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by fidotron 4532 days ago
This is intriguing - I had no idea that the Mozilla experience so closely mirrored my own.

The fun thing about Android is you can often spot when apps load the native code library since it generally leads to mysterious black screens during the loading of activities for exactly the kind of reasons mentioned there.
1 comments
lstamour 4532 days ago
I would point out to all the above commenters, that Chrome is still largely native code, with simple wrappers on iOS and Android. http://www.chromium.org/developers/design-documents/android-...
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fidotron 4532 days ago
Yes, but this also goes some way to explaining my assertion that such apps are disproportionately large and slow to start - Chrome exhibits exactly that behaviour.

When they get closer to having the OS WebView actually updated via Chrome channels then it's conceivable that the apparent startup time will come down, and it wouldn't surprise me if this is one of the main reasons for it.

If you see this recent thread: https://groups.google.com/a/chromium.org/forum/#!topic/blink...

They even say this: "The web is quite far behind in mobile, which is why we're applying a greater amount of focus to solving the problems we have on mobile, even at the expense of nice-to-have features."

This is quite an admission, and at odds with a lot of their noise. It's also telling about their problems because Chrome suffers from a sort of death by a thousand cuts. On mobile to get the user experience people demand (they aren't wrong to be after 60fps performance as studies have shown mobile users are even pickier than desktop net users) you simply can't afford things like that anywhere, let alone right as the app starts up.

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corresation 4532 days ago
You seem to think that each of these posts is supporting what you claim, when it's doing nothing of the sort.

Firefox was slow because it had a very expensive abstraction layer that, while tolerable on a high power desktop, was just too much for what could be a low power mobile device. They didn't switch from C++ to Dalvik, they changed their GUI layers and how they initialize. This does nothing, at all, to support your claim about native apps being either slow to start or being large.

Nor does the Chrome bit. It's a large, full-featured browser. Further, on what is it slow to start?

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