Sadly, Apple and/or Google have the power to retard the adoption of HTML5 as long as they like.
"But ender7," you say, "both Mobile Safari and Chrome have great support for HTML5."
Yes, they do. Sort of. Except for the crippling bugs in many of their implementations. Some of these bugs render the APIs in question essentially useless on mobile. Or just a giant pain in the ass to work around. Or have performance issues so large that they are impractical for non-toy purposes.
How quickly these bugs (and perfomance issues) get fixed will have a huge effect on HTML5 vs. native adoption. So far, this seems to be happening at a rate of "meh". For example, iOS 6 finally fixed the bugs in its HTML5 History API that prevented anyone from using it in a real product. But they did fix it. It only took...a few years.
> How quickly these bugs (and perfomance issues) get fixed
> will have a huge effect on HTML5 vs. native adoption.
Hardly. I say that as a guy who've spent more than a dozen years making web. HTML does not scare me, I like CSS and can do fancy stuff with it, I have no problem with JavaScript.
I am moving however to Objective-C and Cocoa world. It is so clean and tidy compared to the mess the web technologies stack is. And no matter how great support for HTML5 will be, no matter how performant it becomes—it will be well adopted and very performant mess. We can bring in frameworks and libraries, duct-tape things together, but we are long past the point where we could get rid of all the ugly heritage.
My feeling is, that web technologies will be used mostly for the content leaning apps, and for "apply" the native will be a clear choice.
Then there is this "cross-platform development" thing. Well, not sure about this one. I guess we are bound either to have mediocre solution for all, or bite the bullet and do native for each platform if best results are desirable.
Beginning with version 4.1, WebView is created from a recent snapshot of chromium before every major release. At least that is what Google Engineers said during the Android Fireside chat at Google I/O.
>Though the operating system for the iPhone, iPod and iPad is proprietary, we strongly believe that all standards pertaining to the web should be open. Rather than use Flash, Apple has adopted HTML5, CSS and JavaScript – all open standards. Apple’s mobile devices all ship with high performance, low power implementations of these open standards. HTML5, the new web standard that has been adopted by Apple, Google and many others, lets web developers create advanced graphics, typography, animations and transitions without relying on third party browser plug-ins (like Flash). HTML5 is completely open and controlled by a standards committee, of which Apple is a member
> If developers need to rewrite their Flash websites, why not use modern technologies like HTML5, CSS and JavaScript
>New open standards created in the mobile era, such as HTML5, will win on mobile devices (and PCs too). Perhaps Adobe should focus more on creating great HTML5 tools for the future, and less on criticizing Apple for leaving the past behind
It's been two and a half years since that, and still HTML5 has major issues. Given Apple's engineering prowess, I doubt that HTML5 is a priority for them, or else they would've had a great implementation by now.
They know that all the apps in the App Store serve as excellent lock in against Android, Windows Phone and RIM. Why make it easier for people to switch instead of dragging their feet with a small update every year?
>It's been two and a half years since that, and still HTML5 has major issues. Given Apple's engineering prowess, I doubt that HTML5 is a priority for them, or else they would've had a great implementation by now.
Well, noticed how Android's own web browser is even worse in HTML5 than Mobile Safari? And this is Google, the guys that really like mobile html5 apps.
Fact is, it's not that easy to make a good mobile browser --heck, it's not that easy to make a good desktop browser.
Still, desktop HTML5 leaves a lot to be desired. Forms support is lacking, the audio side is neglected, SVG still lacks features and is not properly accelerated (even the latest IE that just got it is better in this regard), the client side storage didn't pan out well, typography is still crappy, etc. And this is for the desktop, that doesn't have the battery, memory and performance concerns of the mobile.
And it holds true for Safari, Chrome AND Firefox.
So, in case you're thinking Apple is doing something especially malicious here, well, they are not.
Picking on one point: "Well, noticed how Android's own web browser is even worse in HTML5 than Mobile Safari"
The stock Android browser fell behind in late 2010. If you follow PPK of quirksmode.org you know this (e.g., the following article was authored just before stock android fell behind: http://www.quirksmode.org/mobile/browsers.html). After that article he really began hating all over Android due to the fall-behind.
Basically, Google mostly abandoned the stock browser because they wanted to focus everything on Chrome for Android. They accomplished this last year, and it fixed virtually all the HTML5 complaints that have been leveled against Android. Chrome is only supported on Android 4+. Android 4+ devices are on track to become the best-selling Android phones of all time, such as the S3 which singlehandedly outsold the iPhone in August. In a year Android 2 & 3 will have negligible market share, as Froyo does today (15%).
Android with Chrome is at least as good as the iOS browser -- probably better. So this isn't a problem here.
I remember the news was all over the tech-web, including HN. A quick Google will yield you multiple hits, but in case you are lazy (I know I am), here is one of them:
Well, noticed how Android's own web browser is even worse in HTML5 than Mobile Safari?
"Android's browser"? Care to elaborate on which browser that is?
The one built from source? Which version of the source would that be? Or would it be Chrome? Or Firefox? Or Opera? Or Dolphin? Or Maxthon? or MIUI browser? Or the one included with TouchWiz? In which case, which version of Touchwiz?
And how is it "even worse"? You mean it doesn't behave like Mobile iOS Safari so that sites specifically tailored for iOS-devices doesn't work out of the box on Android? What a shock that is, eh? It's almost like I write sites specifically for MSIE, and they don't render correctly in Firefox. Haven't we heard about this story once before?
I'm not debating the correctness of your statement, but when you start out with something as mindblowingly pointless as "Android's browser is even worse" it's hard to take the rest of your point seriously.
> I'm not debating the correctness of your statement,
Actually you are.
> but when you start out with something as mindblowingly
> pointless as "Android's browser is even worse" it's hard
> to take the rest of your point seriously.
It is not pointless. Don't pretend to be silly as not to understand what "Android browser" is.
> Don't pretend to be silly as not to understand what "Android browser" is.
In that case, I challenge you to pinpoint what browser I'm writing this comment from. It should be obvious. It is the Windows-browser.
(And before you start debating how that sounds ludicrous, take a step back and realize how Android is more like Windows and Linux than iOS when it comes to software-choice, not to mention versions and revisions and forks)
It's slightly more complex than that. Google has made an effort to make Chrome the default browser going forward. However this will only affect Jelly Bean (and to a lesser extent ICS as it is an optional install there).
However I believe that apps still have to use the built in rendering engine when using the WebView control.
I'm not sure whether this is a strategic or technical decision from Google but I suspect the latter. Changing the WebView engine would have a major effect on compatibility for existing apps.
> Sadly, Apple and/or Google have the power to retard the adoption of HTML5 as long as they like.
I'm hopeful that Firefox OS and Firefox for Android will be able to exert competitive pressure in the HTML5 app space, but it will still be a long, hard slog.
Realistically, though, Google have always seemed to view HTML5 as being a very good thing, since the Web is their bread and butter. Android seems to be more of a hedge against other vendors' platform dominance than an attempt by Google to lock everything down -- thus why Google actually exerts little control over Android distribution.
And I can see a good argument for blocking the open Web being in Apple's interests, but again, historically they've been going as fast as anyone else. They might not move as fast as I'd like, but they're not lagging.
I kind of like Dolphin browser on iPad; have been playing with it for sometime. It kicks Safari's ass big time, except for the no_file_upload option the web standards' way.
I've seen a couple of posts from people comparing iPad's Safari with IE6 (although, Safari has been improving in past few releases...) so not sure which is the favorite browser for people on iPad.
"But ender7," you say, "both Mobile Safari and Chrome have great support for HTML5."
Yes, they do. Sort of. Except for the crippling bugs in many of their implementations. Some of these bugs render the APIs in question essentially useless on mobile. Or just a giant pain in the ass to work around. Or have performance issues so large that they are impractical for non-toy purposes.
How quickly these bugs (and perfomance issues) get fixed will have a huge effect on HTML5 vs. native adoption. So far, this seems to be happening at a rate of "meh". For example, iOS 6 finally fixed the bugs in its HTML5 History API that prevented anyone from using it in a real product. But they did fix it. It only took...a few years.