>>> "Some of us aren’t ready to give up on HTML5 yet."<p>Who was "giving up" on HTML5 just because some founder of some company said so to begin with? I appreciate that Mark's HTMl5 app was less efficient than his native app. Sucks for him and his team, I guess. My question is: So what? These are just tools. Pick one that is appropriate for your company, given the entire context of the product you are attempting to deliver, and make a practical and well thought out decision. For so very many, HTML5 is the right choice. For many others, it's not.<p>Soo... Sorry, I get bored with hyperbolic, "The Rise of..." and, "The Death of ..." articles.
The Zuck is sort of right though. There is no doubt that the iOS / Android FB app is pretty slow and buggy due to their dependence on HTML5. They've gotten grilled by their users in the past -- although props to them for really improving it recently.<p>I'm not saying that HTML5 is a bad technology or anything, it just isn't quite there yet.<p>Good article nonetheless.
<i>Even if Mark’s view is correct (debatable), the only way HTML5 will ever ‘get there’ is if the developer community continues to build apps on HTML5 that push the boundaries of performance.</i><p>The presumption that the developer community can impact this is also debatable. What proof-points in history are there for technologies that became popular or standard because DEVELOPERS decided to adopt them? In most cases you come up with, I bet you'll find their success was short-lived or medocre. Compared to say Objective-C and iOS or Win32.<p>Platforms (and related technologies) become popular/de-facto-standards because CUSTOMERS buy the value proposition of the product. Developers then adapt/adopt.<p>I'm not saying developers have no impact, I just don't think the impact is enough to really move the ball.
>Choose any technology or any API you want and build a <i>mobile or mobile-web</i> application that showcases HTML5’s capabilities<p>>- Both <i>web or mobile web</i> apps are fine.<p>Is it me or this is quite confusing ? Could someone from Filepicker.io make this clear, please ? :)
Ben Sandofsky of Twitter wrote a well-reasoned take on the whole HTML5 vs. native apps debate: <a href="http://sandofsky.com/blog/shell-apps.html" rel="nofollow">http://sandofsky.com/blog/shell-apps.html</a><p>I've had very similar experiences working on both HTML5 and native apps.
Hmm. So the argument that web will eventually over take native mobile apps has been made over and over. Sure an O(n lgn) algorithm is better, but if the constants are bad enough, I'm going with the O(n^2). Even the author admits that native apps were around for nearly 20 years. Accounting for the fact that things move faster now so it might be less, we're still only a couple years into a decade long era of installed mobile applications. Then, we still have to account for the bad network connections on the phone that make web apps harder to work with.<p>While I'm skeptical of the mobile argument, I'm super excited about html5 dev conf because I do think HTML5 is going to be big on desktop/laptops.
I don't dispute HTML5 can perform well if optimized the right way. What I would dispute though is that it's actually far harder to develop a web app that feels native than it would be to just make native apps. Plus people want access to device sensors, push notifications, background tasks, etc. that are also hard to get at through javascript.