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by pooriaazimi 4927 days ago
> HTML5 done properly

I've seen Gmail.app on a friend's iPhone 4S (with dual-core A5) and it's slower than Apple's Mail.app on my sister's iPhone 3G (with a 300MHz ARMv6, which I think is under clocked to 230MHz or something like that).

When Google (king of the Internet and HTML5) fails to "do HTML5 properly", then the rest of us really don't have much chance.

(and, no, it's not (entirely) UIWebView's fault. If Google were allowed to use Nitro or V8, Gmail.app would be 40% faster. But that iPhone 5's CPU is like 20 times faster than that crummy old iPhone 3G)
2 comments
chrisringrose 4927 days ago
An email app like Mail just download and keep offline copies of most of the mail. Opening the app and it instantly shows the pre-downloaded stuff. Yes, so in that sense, the mail app is faster. Bravo.

The 40% faster boost takes us into the range of not-really-noticeable. If there were a dev tool to make efficient HTML5 apps just like there is to make native, and this speed difference was in miliseconds, not seconds, developers will flock to HTML5.

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pooriaazimi 4927 days ago
I have to disagree. I didn't mean that Mail.app "shows stuff" faster because it's cached the data and there's no roundtrip to the server (BTW, Gmail.app does this too). I meant the animations, scrolling and general speed with which "things" happen after you touch something or swipe.

And as I said, even if HTML5 rendering gets 40% faster, it's still extremely slow compared to native UIKit stuff. HTML5 is like 3 times slower than UIKit if you have any animation (and by animation, I don't mean really fancy stuff even - even moving a rounded rectangle from point A to point B).

It's not this drastic on Android, but iOS's graphics stack has been heavily optimized so a lot of stuff happens in layers in GPU. UIWebView, because of its implementation, does (almost) all its renderings in CPU and almost by definition, is much, much slower than anything that's GPU-accelerated (and takes at least 50% more memory and power).

The difference is like night and day. Open Gmail.app in iPhone 4S or 5 (the new Gmail.app that was released a few weeks ago is faster than previous versions though), and open Mail.app in an iPhone 3G. You'll see the difference clearly.

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chrisringrose 4926 days ago
But I don't. I just loaded up gmail.com on the iPhone, and its nearly flawless. If I click the "show all folders" button, it seamlessly swings over. No lag, no jittery animation.

In fact, I use the built-in Mail app all the time. Loading gmail via IMAP in this Mail app is actually slower than the Gmail.com web app. For example, if I enter a subfolder I've created (labels), and haven't entered it in a long time, there's a considerable lag on the Mail app, and 1 second wait in the Gmail.com web app.

(iPhone 5 BTW)

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greggman 4927 days ago
I wasn't aware the gmail ios app is HTML5. Do you have some link that claims that it is?
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wmil 4927 days ago
It's a hybrid app. Native with some features implemented with web views.

http://geeks.everything.me/2012/12/09/451/

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pooriaazimi 4927 days ago
> Native with some features implemented with web views

Well, some is a little bit misleading. More like most (60-70%) :) - the old app was like 95% web-stuff. The new one (released a few weeks ago) does things more "natively"

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