| I agree with the overall sentiment expressed that web developers can and should do better as it comes to performance.
There were a few inaccurate or misleading remarks in the article that I'd like to draw attention to: 1) Guess how those Instant Articles are formatted? HTML. Guess how those articles get to the app? HTTP. This is misleading because it seems to equate pulling in content with loading an article. By loading these articles into the app (as opposed to launching a browser), Facebook gains the ability to do the following: - Provide the basic styles from app-install time. Most of your css doesn't need to be downloaded. - Skip app boot time. App's take a while to cold start, meaning I don't have to start safari before I start the web request. - Prefetch. I don't know if they do or will do this, but facebook could reasonably prefetch articles and their resources before you click 2) Stop buying into the ‘native is better’ myth. (It’s just different.) Another phrase for "different" is "better at different things". It turns out that the app model provides some amazing guarantees that the web can't match (and vice-versa): - Preloaded styles and logic. Content changes, but presentation stays the same. Only download content. (no caching is not a valid solution, because exercising new parts of the code would require a download. Though some appmanifest magic may let you get pretty close) - Cheap library inclusion. If an app is an extra MB or so it's no big deal most of the time. You can use that to load in libraries that vastly speed up developer work and can do "progressive enhancement" by supported new APIs on old OS versions. Libraries are way more costly on the web as the author points out. - Consistent (with the OS) UX and much cheaper animations - Lower memory footprint These things do matter! The web is amazing, yes. No, it's not dying, but there is value in native apps and they're not equivalent. Smart engineers will make the choice based on their needs which is what both facebook and these news sources are doing. |
People would probably advise me to change my phone, to get a newer one, but why should we change our phones every 2 years? Why create more waste? Why spend money uselessly on stuff that should work for at least 5 years?