[omarqazi]

Watch the video. That's not native performance. It will never be native performance, because there will always be the layer of the rendering engine between your application and device. The best they'll ever do is "close enough to native that you don't notice", and they're certainly not there yet. And the number of apps is already in the millions? Give me an example of one app out there that's in the same ballpark of quality as the stuff you can find on iOS or even Android.

[callahad]

The video does look a bit rough, but that's neither final code nor final hardware. For what it's worth, actually touching one of the Firefox OS dev phones is pretty impressive: it feels much smoother than it looks on that video.

It's not quite up to iOS or Android 4.1 performance, but it's running on far less powerful hardware. It definitely feels better than the initial releases of Android in terms of responsiveness.

> Give me an example of one app out there that's in the same ballpark of quality as the stuff you can find on iOS or even Android.

The HTML5 version of Cut the Rope works pretty great on Firefox OS; the experience is effectively identical to Android and iOS.

[aaronblohowiak]

There is always a rendering engine unless you're writing pixels to the buffer directly. The thing is that Cocoa/CocoaTouch's rendering and compositing is much faster than Webkit's. Why that is, is left as an exercise for the reader.

[omarqazi]

Webkit uses iOS's rendering and compositing libraries to render information on screen. That's why it will never be faster than those libraries.

[TwistedWeasel]

never say never.

Technology evolves and in time hardware improves to a point where the performance difference between native code and something that runs through an intermediate layer is not noticeable in a user interface (although there will always be a difference, it just wont be be relevant any more).

[flyinRyan]

And at that point, native would still be faster....

[goldfeld]

At some point, native would still be faster in the same sense a curve approaches the x-axis but never quite touches it.

The mobile web rendering performance might never hit the 0-grade latency standard where we put native, but it will eventually get so close to it as to not make any difference whatsoever to anyone but cold-hearted scientists the likes of whom whish they could keep their science drinks at absolute zero chilly bins.

[flyinRyan]

I wasn't speaking practically. The GP said "native will always be faster" and that's true. Relevance of that truth is a separate issue.

[Evbn]

HTML hit practically 0 latency 10 years ago then we added DHTML, CSS, encryption, Ajax, 3D, multitasking, 2x DPI and 4x screen size, background syncing, ... When will we stop adding functionality to soak up the hardware power?

[goldfeld]

If we hadn't added those things, HTML&Cia. wouldn't even be a contender to replace native performance now. It would still be a simple technology meant for static information.

If your argument is more in the line of why do games keep getting bigger and meaner, needing more resources, when we could have stopped advancing 3D a decade ago and every computer would be able to play any game today; then that's a whole other discussion. But I like the path towards true virtual reality with photorealistic graphics.

[maxym]

The HTML5 version of Cut the Rope is one example:

http://www.cuttherope.ie/

Here are some other high quality HTML5 games:

http://worldsbiggestpacman.com/ http://www.wordsquared.com/ http://www.pirateslovedaisies.com/ http://browserquest.mozilla.org/