[cdata]

As a developer who has working on and in the browser platform for a long time, I totally agree that the irony of stories like this is thick.

On the other hand, watching browser technology evolve from whatever IE6 was into the sole interface presentation layer for top tier operating systems has been fascinating. Browsers may have failed to bring us a "one true platform" by themselves, but the technologies involved are quickly reaching ubiquity.

[gisenberg]

On a long enough timeline, HTML wins and posts like mine look dated and short-sighted. There's no doubt that things are getting better, and I can't look at at an in-browser demo of Epic Citadel and say that HTML isn't good enough for native apps. Once the tooling catches up, it'll be a moot point.

That said, things are also getting worse.

Fragmentation on the browser and device side is worse than ever. Implementation starts with caniuse.com, followed by ripping out the feature later when browsers support (or partially support) features differently across tablet, desktop and mobile form factors. Mobile browsers tend to be an absolute disaster, in which something as simple as a div with overflow-y requires Herculean effort to implement across devices spanning Android 2 to Windows Phone 8. That's something that should be brain-dead simple, and things don't get much better once you move beyond that.

One popular train of thought I've had enough of is "consistent implementation of X isn't a problem, just include library or polyfill Y and things will be great", which is a mindset that tends to defer problems over solving them when the solution eventually tips over and requires in-depth bug fixing or a from-scratch reimplementation.

[_random_]

Epic Citadel is not implemented using HTML - it's WebGL and JS. Furthermore it's asm.js. And asm.js is an output of C++ transpilation. Why on earth would you run it on tablets instead of just using existing C++ code base to get native performance on all devices?

[pjmlp]

And lets not forget it is based in the 2006 release of Unreal Engine.

So in 2013, WebGL offers a 2006's 3D GPU performance.

[coldtea]

>So in 2013, WebGL offers a 2006's 3D GPU performance.

I hope you don't say it dismissingly, because to me it's amazing already (given all the other conveniences it gives).

[eonil]

Did you mean feature?

Performance comes from GPU device, not the interface.

Interface like GL just defines features, not how it should perform.

[pekk]

Didn't you hear that Javascript is now faster than C?

[eonil]

Nope. I heard LuaJIT does in some cases. So bring some numbers. I want to check it out.

[_random_]

In some sort of carefully "crafted" regex tests? Also a language can't be faster, did you want to say that JIT is faster than native?

[camus2]

> On a long enough timeline, HTML wins

As a developer never ever take any technology for granted, ever.

> I can't look at at an in-browser demo of Epic Citadel

I have a pretty decent laptop , this demo wont run on any browser. The performances are just not here , they are nowhere near native even on desktop.

[icebraining]

It depends on the drivers and such as well, though. I have a Sapphire HD5750, which was a low-end card two years ago, and the demo works fine, with the CPU barely hitting 30%.