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Comment by asadotzler | Hacker News Reader

The iPhone tried it 6 years ago. That's a long time on the Internet.

Since then, JS has gotten about a billion times faster across pretty much all browsers. Also, "HTML5" was still woefully incomplete back then but browser vendors have since filled out support for key enabling technologies -- especially the wide variety of device access APIs that Apple never even tried to provide.

When I hear this refrain, I'm often tempted to ask how old the poster is because it seems to show a lack of historical knowledge of long-term Web trends.

Six years is a LONG time.

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> I'm often tempted to ask how old the poster is

Go ahead. You might find there is a lot more to computing then web programming and not everyone works as a web developer.

"Since then, JS has gotten about a billion times faster across pretty much all browsers."

1 billion = 10^9. If what you say is true, then the average length of JS code must have increased about 10^10, because despite increased bandwidth, most sites seem to run slower than they did 6 years ago. That is some pretty prodigious coding(8-))

Or maybe it's write delay caused by the NSA.

You also have to consider a dramatic increase in what JS does in addition to there being 10^10 more JS in the first place. You didn't really see JS libraries being used on every site (especially staples like jquery and angular, which combined add a few megs to pageloads). The use cases of JS have shifted - many sites don't even render anything with JS turned off anymore.

In theory that jquery and that angular file should be sourced

> Since then, JS has gotten about a billion times faster across pretty much all browsers.

JS has gotten slightly faster, but not much. JS isn't really a bottleneck anyway.

Six years has also increased the pixel count by 10x (150k pixels in the iPhone 1 vs. 2 million in the SGS4). The hardware has barely gotten faster relative to pixel count, and in some respects (such as memory bandwidth) has gotten slower.

The web is no more viable on mobile today than it was 6 years ago. Web doesn't do efficient - never has, probably never will.

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