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Comment by kaolinite | Hacker News Reader

A lot of the points that they make in the video are just flaws with Facebook's implementation of the app, rather than being a point for HTML5 or a point against native.

Truth is - HTML5 apps can be made to perform well but there are limits. Battery life suffers and you may find in future that the cool animation/whatever you wanted to add in is too laggy (especially on older devices).

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Older devices will slowly dissipate from the market because of the ubiquitous two-year contracts, though, and eventually everyone's phones will be capable of delivering native-like performance on HTML5 apps. It's only a matter of time.

The moment older devices slowly fade out from the market, and new high end devices started to fade in, native app speed now doubled.

Doubled from awesome to... awesome? Native performance is the goal. I don't see how much better a data heavy native app like FB can get, but I do see how HTML5 apps can get better.

Battery life suffers

Really? If anything I would have thought that HTML5 was more battery efficient- there's only so much you can do with it, after all.

I spent a long time optimising a mobile webapp I was working on and while it was 95% there, that last 5% bugged me to no end. So I investigated native options. But I learnt to avoid mixing CSS3 box-shadows with transition animations and that sort of thing- you definitely suffer in FPS.

Of course native is more efficient - it takes fewer CPU cycles to get what you want done. Now you're right that as a result you might be more likely to include animations and effects etc which will drain more power, but that's a choice you can make.

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