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"...no downloading, nothing runs until you lift your finger off the screen."

It's not true. The browser continues fetching data, and the kernel continues with context switching.

I'll have to try it again then. Last I'd looked at it (this was early iOS 5), though, it caused really nasty issues with a preloading gallery I was working on. We ended up having to preload several slides in advance, as iOS would just flatly refuse to do anything in the page until the user had removed their finger from the page. The context switching I'll give you. I really meant that the browser appears to stop doing all its stuff while you're touching the screen, not that the system comes to a full halt. Obviously the render loop is still running.

The fact that you also don't get scroll position updates until the drag momentum wears out is also a giant pain in the ass.

Maybe that's why iOS has so much more "mobile data" - all these weird hacks like prefetching a bunch of data the user may never see in order to make scrolling behavior more acceptable.

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