No app store? No problem: Grooveshark rolls out full HTML5 site for all devices
venturebeat.com
venturebeat.com
minimal complications is a euphemism for "Any normal user would throw the thing against the wall in frustration."
To me this is just further demonstration of the failure of HTML5 on mobile. It's been, what, 4 years we've been in the "HTML5 will save us all" hype bubble?
Don't get me wrong; I am building a webapp and aspects of HTML5 have made my life far easier than if I were still in 2008. If I had hair I'd still be pulling it out due to the complexities of CSS (even with things like LESS) and subtle browser differences would turn the rest of it gray. But the current state of HTML+CSS+JS on the desktop is pretty good; compared.
We appear to be years away from a similar state in mobile. Between Safari's problems with no JIT support within apps and the fragmentation of Android, coupled with the monstrosity known as IE on WP7 (and WP8 and Win8), it is just not possible to use "HTML5" to build a great mobile experience (and reach a large audience).
My history in working with the W3C (I worked on HTML 3.2 and 4), and my understanding of the asymetric competitive nature of the major players (Apple, Google, Microsoft) makes me believe this situation is not going to radically improve anytime soon.
The upside is dev tool vendors who can help ease the pain should do pretty well (e.g. things like Xamarin (C#) and MoSync (C/C++/JavaScript))...
Everyone is moving away from HTML5 (Facebook, etc.). Grooveshark is only moving toward HTML5 because what they do is fundamentally illegal and the app stores have shut them out.
Facebook moving toward native: http://gizmodo.com/5937313/facebooks-updated-ios-app-is-full...
Grooveshark was sued again today: http://news.cnet.com/8301-1023_3-57506524-93/new-lawsuit-add...
But yes, I'm not saying that their app is fully HTML5. I'm saying that HTML5 still has a major role in their app.
As that article states they couldn't or may have not wanted to pay the cost for streaming EMI's music. Heck there is a ton more money to be made when your not paying the content owners who without their content there would be no Grooveshark. THe masses would care less for it.
In 2012 I am surprised a court ruled in their favor as with Youtube it's focus wasn't just popular music, same goes for justin.tv. THough with Grooveshark their M.O. is access to popular music and now you can get all the music you want for free whenever you want through your mobile device.
I wonder how much longer it will last? Megaupload anyone? Well i'm going to cancel my Spotify subscription and use this instead!
I tried using Grooveshark's html5 web app the last few days.
I thought I might be able to cancel Spotify in which I use everytime I drive (few times a day). Using Grooveshark's web app in the car is NO REPLACEMENT for Spotify, as a playlist doesn't play contiguously and if it does there is a one to two minute delay between each track. Other times between tracks while driving I've had to fidget with the play/pause button to start tracks.
Spotify is the clear winner and I'm happy paying subscriber!
Go to facebook.com on your mobile phone. When that stops working / being developed you can say they are moving away from html5.
Overall, web apps as a platform have made a lot more growth than native mobile apps have aince the advent of the smartphone. There's no reason to look at the state of html5 now and say "it'll never work". Sure, there are some things that native is better for, but html5 is a very useful tool and can give a great user experience in a lot of cases, and it's only going to get better.
I'm not sure if you are trying to be serious or not with this. Do you really believe this is true today? That you can build a mobile experience using HTML that compares to that of a native app?
Certainly there are SOME cases where it makes sense. But for MOST apps, it simply does not. For example, let's say I wanted to build an app that used location and could run in the background. How, exactly, would I build a "web app" that worked across iPhone, iPad, and say 75% of Android devices?
And how is whatever you come up with "HTML5"?
WORA has always been, and always will be a pipe dream. HTML5 gets closer but, unfortunately, due to the dynamics of mobile the target is moving further away.
What I don't get is how people direct their disappointment with the state of html5 towards "html5" as though the idea was to blame, or the idea has failed.
If you want to know why html5 is slow to roll out on mobile it should be blatantly obvious: there is almost no competition. Whereas on desktop competition is fierce. On iOS competition is outright disallowed. On Android it is allowed, but it is harder to get people to switch than on desktop. So this is why we see the "once a year" browser updates on the 2 major platforms.
BTW - the mobile browser app is incredible.
I didn't realize the "users sharing tracks they pirated" industry had had trouble with adapting to new challenges. If anything, they have the most experience adapting to new challenges.
Edit: Before someone says "not every single track on Grooveshark was pirated," think carefully about whether that's an intellectually honest argument to make.
Don't lecture me about "intellectual honesty" after referring to file-sharers as if they were an uniform entity and likening them to an "industry".
I was referring to services whose business models are designed to exploit file sharing behavior as an "industry." Not the file sharers themselves.
Right, it's just that that's the industry Grooveshark is in, not the music industry. They're trying to muscle into the music industry with their userbase. But they'd never exist if they hadn't assumed users would share tracks illegally en masse from the start.
It makes me weep a little for the web when browsers cripple HTML5 like this; there's enough intrinsic downsides of running apps inside a browser (e.g. no app store, no presence on homescreen, no background processing) without having to worry about things that should work but don't.
I filed the bug here in case anyone wants to star it (someone mentioned Grooveshark just today in fact): http://code.google.com/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=121898
Ironically, Chrome for iOS behaves correctly, because it's running on the same engine as Mobile Safari, which gets HTML5 audio right.
It's light and fast. No flash annoyances. Also it doesn't have DPI issues.
Now then again, it's streaming MP3/AAC so only Chrome and IE seems to work ok.
Firefox for example just cannot play it.
Thanks patents.
I went to the site, searched for a random band and picked a playlist (a large one ~500 songs if it helps). I went to the playlist view and started scrolling through the songs, relatively quickly. I noticed the "bar" at the bottom of the playlist view was flickering a lot, you could see the upcoming song rows through it when it flickered then 'bam' whole browser crashed. Relaunched safari, it still had the grooveshark tab open, almost instantly crashed again.
Suggestion: start on the Popular tab, not Search. There's already a dedicated search field, and when I got to the page the big empty search area made me think the page was broken. Starting on Popular also would give a one-click-to-experience factor.
Very cool app!
I do, so it works great for me.
Also, "playing" songs adds them to your run queue. you can also "play next" or "play last" to queue them appropriately.
In the search results, if you scroll past the song results, you'll see an album list. Tap the album list. "Play now" will queue the entire album in order.
They have the functionality, you're just not used to their terrible UX. (I'm a longtime paying Grooveshark and Spotify user, so I'm used to navigating this nonsense)
It becomes a bit frustrating because basically the only way to listen to an album is to search for it. I'm mostly OK with that workaround, but the problem is that many albums have duplicates. I specifically select particular tracks I want in the library to make sure I can maintain consecutive playback of entire albums that do require it; a selection process which is rendered useless when re-doing the search from ground up on the go.
Edit: looking at other comments it seems I may still be seeing the old version (still says beta at the top) here in Japan. Will try again later..
EDIT: Just found this http://getfactotum.com. But it'd still be better if there was some HTML5 support for it since the app only works on specific sites.
iOS is actually very cool in this department as it treats HTML5 audio as a native audio track, so it works with bluetooth controls, the play icon shows up in toolbar, works in the background, etc. Everything native audio does.
The reason next/prev doesn't work is because HTML5 audio has no concept of a playlist. It's just a dumb audio tag with exactly one source URL to play. So iOS really has no way to map what's going on in the browser into the usual concept of a playlist and it has no API to call to move to the next or previous track.
It's still well ahead of the other mobile OSs though, in the way it does at least treat HTML5 audio as standard audio, to the extent that's possible.
They are not paying the artist for the music they play.
So they are stealing from people like me.
10% goes to the artist, maybe? Even less?
I'm sincerely curious, I'm buying an album at iTunes right now
> No app store? No problem.
I don't believe there's any reason my IP would be identified differently, but I can tell that except for once on the first day this never happened again from any device here.
What's "full" HTML5?
What's all devices?
Is it this?
<div id="homeFooter" class="container_footer main_background">
Oh what's this video front and center in the middle of the page?
Flash. I click on the link to the website that's gone full HTML5 on all devices and am staring Flash in the face.
I feel like I've been had. Much more so for the Flash video than the nit on semantic tags.
Edit:
Ah ha! By rolled out they meant sequestered away at http://html5.grooveshark.com, not http://grooveshark.com. They should really be linking to the HTML5 version of the site from the article. It's also the page I get when I use my phone to access the site.
There we have an audio tag, though <div id="page-header" ...> exists instead of a header tag.
Ah well, these are super minor nits at the end of the day. I'm glad for any site that is trying to get away from app stores and go native. I still feel like the term "full HTML5" is a tad vague (and not yet true).
Grooveshark takes content created by someone else and then profits from the distribution of that content without permission and without passing back any revenue to the rightful owner of the content. How does that compare to uber?
I'm not comparing the individual actions of the companies. Only that sometimes "the law" is not useful anymore.
Which yes, I am saying that copyright needs to change, the notion of a 'rightful owner of content' needs to change. Having laws that are completely contrary to how society operates are generally doomed to fail.
Just because it is easy to copy music online doesn't mean all music should be 'free' and every artist should just abandon what many of them rely on to make a living just because you want to save some money on your entertainment.
Is it a sense of entitlement? or is it a rejection of the monetization of culture?
Given a lot of arts are heavily inspired by the culture around them, who gives the artist the 'right' to own all 'rights' to music they create
Poetry is an art that doesn't make money (compared to music), has poetry died? Just because we monetized something doesn't mean it was the right thing to do.
Wait. The music industry made some 2 digit billions of dollars last year. No one wants to pay for music entertainment?
> Given a lot of arts are heavily inspired by the culture around them, who gives the artist the 'right' to own all 'rights' to music they create
Substitute your profession above for artists. Do you feel the same? Everyone is inspired from things which came before them, and yes you can profit off of your new creation which has been influenced from culture which has come before you.
> Poetry is an art that doesn't make money (compared to music), has poetry died?
It doesn't? Here is a list of the top selling books on Amazon labeled poetry: http://www.amazon.com/Best-Sellers-Books-Poetry/zgbs/books/1...
Top 3: Shakespeare, Beowulf, The Odyssey. The publishing companies who printed these books and spent the time typesetting, translating them etc aren't making money?
> Just because we monetized something doesn't mean it was the right thing to do.
This argument only seems to come up in context to books/music/movies. IE: Entertainment which you can easily get for free and think people should be compensated zero dollars for it now because of the internet. Ridiculous. Why are the people who create entertainment the only ones who should work for charity? Note: it isn't some noble cause, it is because you don't rely on that industry to put food on the table, are cheap, and can get your entertainment online for free instead.
I posed it as a question, if people are not prepared to pay for something (e.g they download it for free), it because it is priced wrong (too high). That doesn't mean all music is priced too high.
> Substitute your profession above for artists. Do you feel the same? Everyone is inspired from things which came before them, and yes you can profit off of your new creation which has been influenced from culture which has come before you.
You can't substitute any profession over the top. Arts are intrinsically different, their value is much harder to calculate. This has long been discussed throughout history, it is only in very recent history that some of the arts have become a 'profession'.
> Top 3: Shakespeare, Beowulf, The Odyssey. The publishing companies who printed these books and spent the time typesetting, translating them etc aren't making money?
Right...not the artist.. That is a strange argument to make. In all those cases, the artist is long died, and someone (else) is trying to make a buck off of their work... Copyright is only meant to last the life time of the author + 50(?) years... So Shakespeare and Homer are really bad examples in a copyright debate.
> This argument only seems to come up in context to books/music/movies.
This argument comes up every time there is a major shift in how people act/produce. The same 'debate' occurred when the printing press destroyed monopolies on books... Who's response was: Copyright.
> it isn't some noble cause, it is because you don't rely on that industry to put food on the table, are cheap, and can get your entertainment online for free instead.
Nice ad hominem. Though try to keep that out of the discussion please.
Think about how much smaller the music industry would be, and I'm just talking about the number of people making music themselves, if there were no sales of recordings. No more buying a CD on your way out of a local or touring band's show, no more iTunes Music Store or Amazon MP3 or CD store, no more labels; you're talking about taking away a majority of these artists' revenue. If musicians can't ever hope to get paid enough to put food on their table and a roof over their head, how many will put in the energy needed to bring their music to fruition? How many will put in the effort to make good recordings for you to enjoy? Making a good recording is difficult and expensive, and we benefit greatly from it. There is value there for us that we should have the courtesy of recognizing if we hope to enjoy a wide selection good music recordings in the future.
That, plus the fact I think copyright is the wrong way to monetize this, and new ways need to be created.
But you are right, the discussion has deteriorated.
In the music business there is certainly a fairness issue of middlemen taking a large cut, but Grooveshark is not solving that.
I guess its silly of me to not take "all devices" as "all mobile devices", which is reasonable in the context of site vs appstore
On a handheld device, we automatically direct you to the html5 site when you visit grooveshark.com
I'm curious where 3rd party services come in in slightly more detail - I'd always assumed what I saw on grooveshark was a 100% client-server app. I'm assuming they're something like pulling from an album art service or a similarly ornamental interface that wasn't even worth carrying over to the mobile experience.
What's "flaky" mean? Do you mean that using it sometimes resulted in failure to deliver audio to a user with a compatible user-agent? If so, that sucks. Which browsers, any ideas what's wrong with it? If not - could you clarify?
I may strongly disagree with Grooveshark as a company, but that doesn't mean you aren't one of the only legitimate players with experience in delivering audio on the web. I am curious to hear more.
That's how it's supposed to be. When you go to grooveshark.com on your phone you get the html5 app, from anywhere else you get the main (flash using) site. Using html5.grooveshark.com takes you to the html5 site no matter what.