[ntaso]

I can recommend Impact.js. It's a commercial engine for 99$ but so far, I enjoyed working with it. It's canvas-based and optimized for tile-based 2D-games, but you can do other 2D-games as well with it. It comes with a nice level editor.

You can get near-native performance with Ejecta, which is something like a WebGL enhanced Canvas-only version of a web browser to put the game on the App Store.

http://impactjs.com/

(Note: not affiliated, I just like the engine)

[GlickWick]

I used impact.js for a while. Really solid framework for building web games.

I'm not sold on Ejecta though. I spent some time with it and found it debilitatingly difficult to debug issues, especially performance problems.

[evo_9]

Another option is Phaser - A free, open source game engine similar to Impact: http://phaser.io/

[kin]

I've been seeing Phaser a lot. Does anyone know of any commercially successful games built with these HTML5/JS engines? I understand success should have nothing to do w/ framework but certainly there are limitations/struggles of trying to build a non-native game.

I'm basically trying to see if I should bet that mobile browsers will mature enough or if I should simply invest my time in learning native mobile dev

[thoughtpalette]

I've played around with Phaser, and I've played around with PhoneGap. Using what you know will always get your further faster than learning native, but there _could_ be performance issues depending on the game.