What's the point? [LWN.net]

What's the point?

Posted Mar 1, 2012 19:50 UTC (Thu) by khim (subscriber, #9252)
In reply to: What's the point? by jmalcolm
Parent article: Mozilla announces HTML5-based phone

I also think that, in general, the best apps will always be native. I think that is possibly part of your point when you say "no good positive selling points" for HTML5.

Not for HTML5. For B2G. I'm skeptical about the whole HTML5 hoopla, too, but there I can at least see some sense: write once, run everywhere, third time the charm (failure number one, failure number two). Well, may be. Who knows. I'm skeptical, but I see the point. B2G, on the other hand. Nope. Not yet, at least.

I actually think it is pretty likely that MOST apps might eventually be written in HTML5. Certainly this has already happened on the desktop to a large extent.

Hardly. Most desktop applications I'm seeing are written with traditional technologies - be it Civilization V, MS Office 2010 or even MS Visual Studio. XULRunner, Air and others flopped spectacularly. If you are talking about success of in-browser app, then these are popular for totally different reason: this is the way to create of "try-before-you'll-trust-it" application (traditional desktop app can do anything it wants with your computer while in-browser app can be run [relatively] safely even if you don't trust the author). Both Android and iOS offer non-HTML5-based solutions for this problem on mobile this this insanely huge advantage does not exist in mobile world.

Unless you are doing something special, the question will be why giving up the benefits of HTML5 will be worth going native.

What benefits? Try-before-buy is available on mobile without HTML5 inconvenience and as I already wrote history shows that cross-platform solutions remain popular only for a short time till the winning platform emerges.

But well, it's hard to see what happens: perhaps HTML5 will indeed reach critical mass before winning platform will be determined - who knows? The problem: even if I suspend my disbelief and agree to temporarily believe in widespread HTML5 technology adoption (widespread, not ubiquitous! there are a limits for how much I can suspend my disbelief) I still can not see what's the selling point of B2G.

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What's the point?

Posted Mar 1, 2012 21:27 UTC (Thu) by kripkenstein (subscriber, #43281) [Link]

>> Unless you are doing something special, the question will be why giving up the benefits of HTML5 will be worth going native.

> What benefits? Try-before-buy is available on mobile without HTML5 inconvenience

iOS apps are not sandboxed, they are manually inspected by App Store people for malware and so forth. So you do have try-before-buy on iOS, but only because the App Store is curated. And curation is a problem as many developers have found, with Apple reviewers being slow or arbitrary in their decisions. Lack of curation is an advantage of HTML5.

> and as I already wrote history shows that cross-platform solutions remain popular only for a short time till the winning platform emerges.

I would argue the exact opposite. In the beginning, native apps win easily because native app platforms can be created and innovated with quickly. Later, standards-based cross-platform solutions appear, that eventually fill in the gaps between them and native apps, and then the benefits of being standards-based and cross-platform win out.

For example, we all used to use native mail apps once upon a time. Today, most of us use HTML5 webmail.

What's the point?

Posted Mar 1, 2012 22:19 UTC (Thu) by sfeam (subscriber, #2841) [Link]

For example, we all used to use native mail apps once upon a time. Today, most of us use HTML5 webmail.

I'm curious if you have any pointers to data that supports this claim. You may well be right, but I would be a bit surprised. Around here (University environment) nearly everyone uses either a university- or gmail- based mail service. But they use native-mail-app-of-choice via IMAP or Exchange, not a web interface. Or maybe you were only thinking of smart phone Email access?

What's the point?

Posted Mar 1, 2012 22:31 UTC (Thu) by kripkenstein (subscriber, #43281) [Link]

Well, data is hard to come by, if someone uses "gmail" then I assume they are using the webmail interface, but they can be using it through IMAP and a standalone client. Likewise if someone uses "outlook" then it might be the native client, or it could be the outlook HTML interface.

Personally, I don't think I know anyone that *doesn't* use gmail with it's web interface. The exceptions are yahoo and hotmail, also with their web interfaces.

Best data I can find is that gmail, hotmail and yahoo mail each have >300M users [1]. It's harder to measure usage of native email clients.

http://www.email-marketing-reports.com/metrics/email-stat...