6 ms·

Full quote of what Mark Zuckerberg actually said about HTML5

304 points by ttaubert 14y ago

melling 14y ago
The context wasn't really necessary. I think we all believe HTML5 has a great future. Hardware gets better at a rapid rate and HTML5 (CSS, Javascript, etc) is still improving. The point is, and was, that it's probably best to produce native apps at this time, for the majority of apps. Facebook, for example, needs a 5 star app.
- muppetman 14y ago
  I think it adds the clarity that they don't think HTML5 is actually bad, but rather that it's still not ready for prime time (for them!) The many other quotes I've read around the web don't mention this, giving more of a "HTML5 sucks" hint to the quote.
  - elorant 14y ago
    Even when HTML5 will be ready for prime time it could never compare to a native app. This isn't a new issue, cross-platform solutions have been around for ages and they always fell short.
    - HyprMusic 14y ago
      Sure, if you're comparing like-for-like experience and performance. But HTML5 provides advantages with rapid development, cross platform, distribution etc. over native apps. The debate is whether these advantages are enough to sacrifice the quality of experience and performance provided by a native app (or rather, whether the gap is sufficiently small enough to justify going for HTML5). Zuckerburg's opinion appears to be... yes, but not quite yet.
    - MatthewPhillips 14y ago
      Fell short in what way? Yahoo Mail came out in 1997 and people flocked to use it. You can guess what the UI was like for Yahoo Mail in 1997. But UX isn't only about UI. Being able to shop for a new computer or phone and knowing the stuff I use will continue to work is great UX as well. There are always tradeoffs. I'm tired of the anti-web brigade acting like web development is only good for the developer.
      - elorant 14y ago
        Once upon a time I worked at a company where we developed in a platform called Clipper. We used a cross-compiler to port apps from a PC to an HP-UX system. Although Clipper was based on C and the cross-compiler created C code it was never as optimized as it could be if written from scratch-actually it wasn't even close. In the years since I've heard numerous stories of similar situations. The one size fits all, which was best materialized by Java, never lived up to its name. You say HTML5 could deliver a unified UX. I disagree. If the problem is the need for unified visual environments then HTML5 is the wrong answer to this problem - CSS is more close to the answer. HTML5 was supposed to be that kick-ass solution for delivering a more robust development platform for the web that could reduce the need for third-party plugins like Flash or Silverlight. I won't argue that what HTML5 has achieved is no small step. But I wouldn't have high hopes of it ever manage to compare head-to-head with a native app, no matter how mature it would become-and that last part takes a lot of argument since evolution of HTML takes ages.
        MatthewPhillips 14y ago
        > You say HTML5 could deliver a unified UX. I disagree. Me too, I never said that. I said that, using Yahoo Mail as an example, users are willing to sacrifice some integrational purity when ease-of-use and portability are so compelling. Today that balance hasn't been tipped on mobile. I'm willing to bet it will be, eventually.
        indiecore 14y ago
        "HTML5" includes CSS, javascript and the actual HTML markup along with a myriad of other things.
- MatthewPhillips 14y ago
  > Facebook, for example, needs a 5 star app. Could you explain why?
  - moystard 14y ago
    Facebook relies on people using their service all the time, when they want. They want it to simply work. That's why they have this obsession about 24/7/365.25 uptime on their servers. It means also no friction when people use Facebook on their mobile, thus a 5 star app.
    - pedrocr 14y ago
      If you're being that precise the calendar actually has an average of 365.2425 days per year and not 365.25. In fact that was the major motivation for switching from the Julian Calendar a full 430 years ago. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gregorian_calendar http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gregorian_calendar
      - raleec 14y ago
        Or, if you're being really precise, you'd say 24/7/52... </pedantry>
      - moystard 14y ago
        I was expecting this kind of comments if I had only written 365 days a year, thought I was covered, apparently not.
        myko 14y ago
        I think the pedantry was invited by the attempt at specifics. C'est la vie.
        pedrocr 14y ago
        I was just kind of surprised to see the .25. If you had put just 365 I'd have read that as "a year" and not give it a second thought. Instead it got me thinking if it actually rounded out to .25 or not so I went and checked. Apparently that wasn't too appreciated... :) No offense intended.
- bad_user 14y ago
  Not necessarily a majority of apps. Facebook is a really, really popular app. They cannot get away with good effort alone. They must make their mobile app flawless and reliable, because if only a couple of users out of hundreds of millions publicly criticize their app, this hurts their reputation badly. I do not agree with what most people are saying. HTML5, CSS, Javascript are already good enough standards for 99% of all apps. The real problem lies with the popular mobile browsers. Anybody who ever tried developing a rich interface for Mobile Safari and for Android knows just how bad things are - and some people think having to support IExplorer 6 was painful. Also, at least on iOS, the browser has better performance than a WebUI embedded in an app. From what I know the web component doesn't use the same Javascript engine for instance. Also, not sure if this changed, but on iOS 4 you couldn't upload files from the mobile browser (file fields in forms were deactivated). You also couldn't automatically place the focus on a form field, to force the keyboard to pop, because you couldn't trigger any mouse/keyboard event other than in response to a physical user action (I think this was a problem with mobile WebKit in general). And I also experienced many problems with Android's browser. I can't even remember all of them.
  - loumf 14y ago
    The difference is that iOS allows Mobile Safari to turn memory areas into code pages, which is what you need to do to JIT JavaScript. It doesn't trust other apps not to be able to exploit that somehow, so UIWebView is not allowed to do this.
    - z92 14y ago
      That explains a lot of things. Thank you.
    - chj 14y ago
      Are you 100% sure? I believe webkit (either in safari or UIWebView) should be able to run JIT, while your custom engine can't.
      - United857 14y ago
- rimantas 14y ago
  I'd say it depends more on app type than on HTML5 progress. For apps what are little more than glorified content viewers HTML is promising, for others — not so much. HTML5 brings some sanity and improvements, but at the roots it is still same old and lame HTML. You may spin and twist it, but at the end the question is "was it worth is". And the answer, most often than not is "hardly". Improving hardware won't change that, at least not substantially.
- ArekDymalski 14y ago
  Without context this partial quote makes deceptive buzz in general media and that's gonna hurt many people and businesses.
- mbesto 14y ago
  > Hardware gets better at a rapid rate and HTML5 (CSS, Javascript, etc) is still improving. Hardware is only improving as fast the vendors see a need to. If the ARM chips in a smartphone suffice for say 90% of the games produce on a iPhone, why on earth increase it's power? We all know (hopefully by now) that the HTML5 spec chews through CPU, especially when called in parallel requests. It's not advantageous for Apple to optimize the HTML5 spec, otherwise it decreases lock-in. Also, this is the same argument that happened in the 90's with desktop/laptops and only really has progressed now with the existence of modern browsers. The only way that this was possible was when telecommunication infrastructure was able to support always connected devices, which the late 90's and early 2000's has proven. We are almost there, but considering 3G (4G, LTE, or whatever) is still not 100% reliable, I don't see this happening anytime soon. I really think we are less "connected" (technologically speaking) than the general public gives us credit for.
  - seanalltogether 14y ago
    Also core count is increasing, but raw speed per core really isn't. Multicore really doesn't help web rendering very much. Nearly all javascript out there is single threaded and most dom rendering is too.
    - VMG 14y ago
      > Nearly all javascript out there is single threaded and most dom rendering is too. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_worker http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_worker
      - gliese1337 14y ago
        That's really not a rebuttal. Yes, lots of browsers now support web workers. Yes, it is therefore possible to write multithreaded javascript. And that may become more common over time. But for now, the fact that it's possible does not change the fact that nearly all javascript is still single threaded.
        14y ago
- NinjaWarrior 14y ago
  > I think we all believe HTML5 has a great future. I don't. Absolutely not. I have a confidence HTML5 will fail in the end. > Hardware gets better at a rapid rate Moore's Law is about to over. We have no free lunch anymore. The next Intel CPU (Haswell) gets only 10% performance improvement at the same clock. And don't you hear our consumers complaining the battery life and the heat problem of their mobile devices? Things become worse on the coming wearable computers. I can't understand why HTML/CSS/JavaScript advocates are so optimistic about this point. And looks like people completely forgot the buzzword of a decade ago, "green computing". My simple question is, "Are you really a SOFTWARE engineer?" HARDWARE engineers will solve the problem. Hah! > HTML5 (CSS, Javascript, etc) is still improving. Yeah, at a deadly slow speed. There are many critical bugs which has been stuck for several years. I'm tired to wait them fixed. Apparently web standards became too complex and about to collapse. Many programmers completely forgot the KISS principle. Very sad.
  - Pkeod 14y ago
    > I have a confidence HTML5 will fail in the end. When is the end? What will replace it in the browser? Will people stop using browsers? Why do you have confidence other than things are not perfect now? >optimistic Being optimistic makes people want to solve problems. Being pessimistic makes people think defeat is 100% likely so they never try to solve anything. Our games already work very well in HTML5. They "work" on an iPad 3, but we still make native versions because the technology we use, Monkey, allows us to very painlessly do so. On desktop, Chrome, Firefox, and IE all run the games perfectly on a now 4 year old computer build. I'm not betting everything on HTML5 but to me it already is succeeding and I am confident that consumers will drive demand for it, vendors will produce and release devices which support it. Even if Apple, or the other big sellers don't support it there will be those who do and the great support will sell units and make anyone who doesn't support it well look bad.
    - soup10 14y ago
      I believe you will always be able to make html5 apps if you want. But I believe the iOS 'apps' model is going to become the standard for consumer pc's. This will cause native apps to no longer be second class citizens, and HTML based apps will have to compete with native just like they do on iOS. Right now basically all consumer computing happens through the browser, except for ms office, and it takes enormous effort to get a non-technical user to install software.
- jksmith 14y ago
  Interestingly, once html5 becomes fully ubiquitous, Facebook will probably already be sliding no matter how well it's native apps run. Will be a non-issue in the end.
tokenizer 14y ago
As a web developer, this is a great thing to hear. Larger companies should focus on the web, and with this context, I don't have to be worried anymore about learning a native phone language.
ollysb 14y ago
"One of the things that’s interesting is we actually have more people on a daily basis using mobile Web Facebook..." this is testament to just how bad the app was.
- deleted 14y ago
  [deleted]
- StavrosK 14y ago
  Not only that. I use the mobile interface rather than the app for two reasons: Sure, the app is badly done and buggy, but, most importantly, it gives Facebook permissions that they've shown time and again they shouldn't have. They've fucked up on more than one occasion, and I know casual users who balk at installing applications that request too many permissions. That's definitely a contributing factor, in my opinion.
  - omaranto 14y ago
    I haven't used iOS in a while, but a couple of years ago the web app was faster (!) and had more features (like liking on comments, not just on status updates) than the native app (presumably because the browser used a JIT for JavaScript and apps an interpreter). I would use the web app for everything except uploading pictures.
- untog 14y ago
  While some of the audience will be because of that, I doubt the majority are. Last time I checked, Facebook's mobile site actually degrades fantastically well, all the way down to old Nokia feature phones. You can bet that in many countries that is a big deal.
  - army 14y ago
    Bingo. Outside of Tech Companies/Silicon Valley/Major US Metro Areas/the US as a whole, iPhones don't have that huge a market share. More people have Android phones, but often running old hardware, old software, and even more have feature phones. If you're reading Hacker News, forget that you're not a typical user at your peril.
goggles99 14y ago
His statement is calculated so he does not receive too much criticism from over-hyped HTML5 cool aid drinkers (which abound in great numbers). I see the wind starting to turn finally, it had been fairly steady since Steve Jobs hot air concerning HTML5.
markmm 14y ago
HTML5 is fine, but it's for developing web UI's not mobile apps. Sure it would be nice if all the main mobile OS's used the same language and frameworks but they don't, people need to get over that and start developing natively.
- TheFuture 14y ago
  It's the glittering lure of write-once run-everywhere. Devs still fall for it, even though we should know better.
gadders 14y ago
The main issue I had with the Android Facebook app wasn't that it was particularly bad in itself, it was just that it depended on a perfect, always on mobile data connection. These things need to work on an asynchronous basis, more like email, to get status updates, post to walls etc.
tonetheman 14y ago
Ha yeah context is not needed. HTML5 is nice but betting a billion dollar business on it does not seem like a great idea.
islon 14y ago
"One of the things that’s interesting is we actually have more people on a daily basis using mobile Web Facebook than we have using our iOS or Android apps combined." That's a hint of how crappy those native facebook apps are. It's barely usable.
- kzahel 14y ago
  That was the interesting part for me, too. I am confused that none of the other comments in this thread touch on that. At first I thought maybe there is a third class of phone that we are omitting, where there is no option for a native app, and so the browser is used. But I don't know what mobile device that would be. Certainly not a nokia phone (though maybe oneday!) I personally started using Safari on my iOS for gmail. The HTML5 experience is simply better than iOS native email experience.
- myko 14y ago
  I have the app on my phone which I use primarily for notifications and then browse touch.facebook.com to actually interact with people. The mobile app experience is that bad.
mmuro 14y ago
No, the context is irrelevant here because Techcrunch got it right. It's a direct quote.
pyrotechnick 14y ago
This is what HTML is capable of: http://ro.me http://ro.me
- markmm 14y ago
  I get "We are sorry, but it appears that your browser does not support WebGL. Please download Google Chrome and try launching this site again." Using Google Chrome
  - tmh88j 14y ago
    Using chrome and it works for me. Absolutely amazing!
- munimkazia 14y ago
  > We are sorry, but it appears that your browser does not support WebGL. Please download Google Chrome and try launching this site again. Using google chrome 21.0.1180.89 on ubuntu 12.04
- kalleboo 14y ago
  Which doesn't work on any mobile device, which is what this quote is talking about.
se85 14y ago
All the context that is needed is said in the first sentence. To claim this was facebook's biggest mistake is surely one of the most ridiculous things i've ever seen or heard the guy say. edit: Mark Zuckerberg has his head up his arse :-)
rjzzleep 14y ago
who cares what zuckerberg said tbh, i doubt he wrote the html5 port and i doubt he was the one who convinced people to go back to native. he's just repeating what some engineer told him. fact is html5 is slow, even more so on none apple phones/tablets. everyone who's worked with it knows it.
dpham 14y ago
Context absolutely matters! Techcrunch sold the article as Facebook betting too much on HTML5, period. His quote was that at the time 2 years ago, it was a mistake betting too much on HTML5 over native for their mobile application. And it's true, 2 years ago and even now, most phones have a hard time handling Facebook's intensive need in HTML5. It's true, Facebook could have spent more engineering resources improving the HTML5 spec and push it forward, but anyone saying context doesn't matter is just being ignorant.
beerglass 14y ago
I guess what he really meant is hybrid apps (native apps with HTML 5 rendering inside them) are not ideal..
grandalf 14y ago
I think it was mostly the design of FB's mobile web app that was bad, not that it was made in HTML5. It was too heavy and didn't optimize well to the iPhone screen size.
francov88 14y ago
Context always matters. People always forget that a rush too quickly into things (kind of like Facebook and an emerging technology). However in the case of Facebook, the error was still made.
joshaidan 14y ago
"...One of the things that’s interesting is we actually have more people on a daily basis using mobile Web Facebook than we have using our iOS or Android apps combined. So mobile Web is a big thing for us." I find this part of the quote interesting. Those people who use mobile web, what platform are they using? Are they using iOS or Android based devices, and using the web? Or are they using other lower end phones? Could this number actually decrease if Facebook linked to the apps in their emails, rather than the mobile site? (I guess this might be hard to pull off, but would be better in the long run)
- segmond 14y ago
  I use mobile web facebook on android. i rather use mobile web for any site than their own app. I don't trust the apps to begin with, besides that, they take up space, cpu usage, battery, etc. so web is better, when i'm done, i close it.
- loire280 14y ago
  My girlfriend uses the mobile web version of Facebook on a semi-dumb slider phone (it might be some variant of Symbian). I find it baffling because the browser is so terrible and the screen is 320x240, but she's perfectly happy with it. She never uses it for any other sites. I wonder if Facebook has an unusually high number of users like that. The demographic would be invisible to the rest of the web community because those users never leave Facebook.
- mcphilip 14y ago
  I can't speak for others but I have an iPhone and choose to only access Facebook through the mobile site. Two reasons: 1. I prefer not to allow Facebook to run a native app on my phone. Various reasons boiling down to not trusting it to act in my best interest. 2. Poor performance of the iPhone app -- I hear the new version is supposed to be better but that still doesn't solve problem 1.
- nicholassmith 14y ago
  Facebook created a very specific version of their site for dumbphones a while ago, I think an article I saw about it said it was targeted at places like Africa etc where mobile phone use is becoming common, but computer usage isn't. Which makes perfect sense really, there's a much larger percentage of the worlds population that use phones over computers in less developed parts of the world. They're a growth segment, no point blocking them when you can hook them now. Edit: http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/free_mobile_facebook_with_0facebookcom.php http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/free_mobile_facebook_wi... there we go, Facebook Zero.
rburhum 14y ago
I am one of those people that had the native app installed and opted for using the web version instead. Why? We all know why!
lemiffe 14y ago
I think he could have phrased it better; Did anyone else think what he said is rather redundant? I don't think context is that important, it's all in the choice of words, and the relations in the discourse. If he failed, it was with making himself clear, not on the matter of HTML5 vs Native.
- mindstab 14y ago
  Maybe everyone doesn't have a constent quotable filter on thinking "is this quotable?" :P People talk poorly in normal conversation. It takes time to craft a good quote.
Zigurd 14y ago
That's a tautology: users prefer a Web interface over sucky apps. Which says fairly little about what user might prefer when the apps don't suck.
gubatron 14y ago
Issues I have with HTML5: - Javascript - Javascript - Javascript - Fragmentation like no other - Lack of APIs - Sandboxed environment - A bunch of morons writing "frameworks" without a clue of computer science (same thing as many popular Wordpress PHP plugins written by people who have no clue of even how memory allocation is supposed to work) - A bunch of other morons copying and pasting the work of other morons. - No real memory management - No real anything or poor support at anything (no sockets, no primitive types, no threads, cross domain BS) - Internet Explorer - Javascript - Internet Explorer - Javascript ... It's just not what the foundation was meant for. It only took Steve Jobs talking about how bad flash was and closing the endless array of development options that we have outside Objective-C and HTML5 to make the world try to reinvent the wheel in javascript, all the while ignoring the fact we have more powerful desktop computers than ever, all the while putting more money in the pockets of those that run cloud infrastructure. I hope more guys like Zuck come out on the record and let the world know this is ludacris, that all these decades working on out of this world compiler optimizations and technology that's light years away from the browser can't be forgotten. Yes, we need to be in the browser, but give me a break, Javascript? It's just sad seeing the turn of events of our industry going in this direction, I'm glad of this whole "App" revolution and Zuckerberg saying this at his first appearance after the IPO, I hope it sobers up a bunch of decision makers.
- michaelmior 14y ago
  I'm confused about the no sockets (WebSockets) and no threads (Web workers) points. These standards may be immature, but they do exist.
- kcbanner 14y ago
  Sockets exist, work, and are used by lots of people.
  - Ryan_Shmotkin 14y ago
    And work on all browser for all people. Or wait.. they don't for most http://caniuse.com/websockets http://caniuse.com/websockets
gubatron 14y ago
Issues I have with HTML5: - Javascript - Javascript - Javascript - Fragmentation like no other - Lack of APIs - Sandboxed environment - No real memory management - No real anything or poor support at anything - Javascript It's just not what the foundation was meant for. It only took Steve Jobs talking about how bad flash was and closing the endless array of development options that we have outside Objective-C and HTML5 to make the world try to reinvent the wheel in javascript, all the while ignoring the fact we have more powerful desktop computers than ever, all the while putting more money in the pockets of those that run cloud infrastructure. I hope more guys like Zuck come out on the record and let the world know this is ludacris, that all these decades working on out of this world compiler optimizations and technology that's light years away from the browser can't be forgotten. Yes, we need to be in the browser, but give me a break, Javascript?
jpswade 14y ago
Zuckerberg is right. HTML5 isn't suitable for the direction Facebook is going which is photos (hence why they bought Instagram). LocalStorage quotas cannot be made bigger than 5MB[1]. I remember trying this Mozilla-built webapp[2] out in Google Chrome, it just didn't work. 1. http://htmlui.com/blog/2011-08-23-5-obscure-facts-about-html5-localstorage.html http://htmlui.com/blog/2011-08-23-5-obscure-facts-about-html... 2. https://hacks.mozilla.org/2010/02/an-html5-offline-image-editor-and-uploader-application/ https://hacks.mozilla.org/2010/02/an-html5-offline-image-edi...
anuraj 14y ago
HTML5 makes sense for what it is meant for. Web development. It is not a desktop or mobile app replacement technology. As long as one is clear about that, everything is fine.
- natrius 14y ago
  Part of HTML5's origin is a draft standard called Web Applications 1.0. HTML5 is meant to be a desktop and mobile app replacement technology. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HTML5#Standardization_process http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HTML5#Standardization_process
  - anuraj 14y ago
    Intent do not always translate to reality. HTML5 does not deliver for mobile/desktop. End of story.
    - natrius 14y ago
      Plenty of products are successfully using HTML5 for applications where it makes sense and are succeeding with it. Blanket generalizations are usually wrong.
      - anuraj 14y ago
        I think you simply refuse to understand - a nail may be pinned using a pickaxe, but when you have a hammer available, which does the job neat , why would you go for the pickaxe? HTML5 is the pick axe which does the job ugly. Mobile developers have little reason to adopt it.
vco 14y ago
"One of the things that’s interesting is we actually have more people on a daily basis using mobile Web Facebook than we have using our iOS or Android apps combined." Yes, a lot of people used the FB mobile web app because Mobile Safari ran their web pages better than the web views of the old native FB app.
- mullingitover 14y ago
  Stole the words right outta my keyboard. There's a reason people are going back to the web site after trying the apps.
deleted 14y ago
[deleted]
whelps 14y ago
The Facebook app was soooooo slow. Perhaps some of that was due to not having a native app, but it seems like the back end API must have been slow as well.
akennberg 14y ago
I used to work on mobile products at Google using both, HTML5 for mobile and native. When betting on HTML5 you get the benefit of quick updates across multiple platforms and smaller team size. However, most of your time is allocated towards finding work arounds for strange browser bugs. Mostly glitches in the UI. With native, things work the right way most of the time, so you can quickly create exciting new features, which excites the team. The down side of native, is that you'll be implementing that exciting new features N number of times for each platform. Now that I am doing a lean startup, the reality is that the first app will be re-written completely. My bet is to focus short-term on one platform and write using native code for speed and lack of bugs (higher moral). For longer-term multi-platform play and if you plan to stay small and lean, I would recommend HTML5 or a hybrid.
cicero19 14y ago
I think HTML5 at the moment is great for making prototype mobile apps. Getting traction before investing in a native app hedges a lot of risk. The approach (native vs. web) also depends on the type of app and the customers you are trying to reach. There is a time and place for both and i think the times and places for HTML5 will only increase in the future.

304 points by ttaubert 14y ago

The context wasn't really necessary. I think we all believe HTML5 has a great future. Hardware gets better at a rapid rate and HTML5 (CSS, Javascript, etc) is still improving. The point is, and was, that it's probably best to produce native apps at this time, for the majority of apps. Facebook, for example, needs a 5 star app.

muppetman 14y ago
I think it adds the clarity that they don't think HTML5 is actually bad, but rather that it's still not ready for prime time (for them!) The many other quotes I've read around the web don't mention this, giving more of a "HTML5 sucks" hint to the quote.
- elorant 14y ago
  Even when HTML5 will be ready for prime time it could never compare to a native app. This isn't a new issue, cross-platform solutions have been around for ages and they always fell short.
  - HyprMusic 14y ago
    Sure, if you're comparing like-for-like experience and performance. But HTML5 provides advantages with rapid development, cross platform, distribution etc. over native apps. The debate is whether these advantages are enough to sacrifice the quality of experience and performance provided by a native app (or rather, whether the gap is sufficiently small enough to justify going for HTML5). Zuckerburg's opinion appears to be... yes, but not quite yet.
  - MatthewPhillips 14y ago
    Fell short in what way? Yahoo Mail came out in 1997 and people flocked to use it. You can guess what the UI was like for Yahoo Mail in 1997. But UX isn't only about UI. Being able to shop for a new computer or phone and knowing the stuff I use will continue to work is great UX as well. There are always tradeoffs. I'm tired of the anti-web brigade acting like web development is only good for the developer.
    - elorant 14y ago
      Once upon a time I worked at a company where we developed in a platform called Clipper. We used a cross-compiler to port apps from a PC to an HP-UX system. Although Clipper was based on C and the cross-compiler created C code it was never as optimized as it could be if written from scratch-actually it wasn't even close. In the years since I've heard numerous stories of similar situations. The one size fits all, which was best materialized by Java, never lived up to its name. You say HTML5 could deliver a unified UX. I disagree. If the problem is the need for unified visual environments then HTML5 is the wrong answer to this problem - CSS is more close to the answer. HTML5 was supposed to be that kick-ass solution for delivering a more robust development platform for the web that could reduce the need for third-party plugins like Flash or Silverlight. I won't argue that what HTML5 has achieved is no small step. But I wouldn't have high hopes of it ever manage to compare head-to-head with a native app, no matter how mature it would become-and that last part takes a lot of argument since evolution of HTML takes ages.
      - MatthewPhillips 14y ago
        > You say HTML5 could deliver a unified UX. I disagree. Me too, I never said that. I said that, using Yahoo Mail as an example, users are willing to sacrifice some integrational purity when ease-of-use and portability are so compelling. Today that balance hasn't been tipped on mobile. I'm willing to bet it will be, eventually.
      - indiecore 14y ago
        "HTML5" includes CSS, javascript and the actual HTML markup along with a myriad of other things.
MatthewPhillips 14y ago
> Facebook, for example, needs a 5 star app. Could you explain why?
- moystard 14y ago
  Facebook relies on people using their service all the time, when they want. They want it to simply work. That's why they have this obsession about 24/7/365.25 uptime on their servers. It means also no friction when people use Facebook on their mobile, thus a 5 star app.
  - pedrocr 14y ago
    If you're being that precise the calendar actually has an average of 365.2425 days per year and not 365.25. In fact that was the major motivation for switching from the Julian Calendar a full 430 years ago. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gregorian_calendar http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gregorian_calendar
    - raleec 14y ago
      Or, if you're being really precise, you'd say 24/7/52... </pedantry>
    - moystard 14y ago
      I was expecting this kind of comments if I had only written 365 days a year, thought I was covered, apparently not.
      - myko 14y ago
        I think the pedantry was invited by the attempt at specifics. C'est la vie.
      - pedrocr 14y ago
        I was just kind of surprised to see the .25. If you had put just 365 I'd have read that as "a year" and not give it a second thought. Instead it got me thinking if it actually rounded out to .25 or not so I went and checked. Apparently that wasn't too appreciated... :) No offense intended.
bad_user 14y ago
Not necessarily a majority of apps. Facebook is a really, really popular app. They cannot get away with good effort alone. They must make their mobile app flawless and reliable, because if only a couple of users out of hundreds of millions publicly criticize their app, this hurts their reputation badly. I do not agree with what most people are saying. HTML5, CSS, Javascript are already good enough standards for 99% of all apps. The real problem lies with the popular mobile browsers. Anybody who ever tried developing a rich interface for Mobile Safari and for Android knows just how bad things are - and some people think having to support IExplorer 6 was painful. Also, at least on iOS, the browser has better performance than a WebUI embedded in an app. From what I know the web component doesn't use the same Javascript engine for instance. Also, not sure if this changed, but on iOS 4 you couldn't upload files from the mobile browser (file fields in forms were deactivated). You also couldn't automatically place the focus on a form field, to force the keyboard to pop, because you couldn't trigger any mouse/keyboard event other than in response to a physical user action (I think this was a problem with mobile WebKit in general). And I also experienced many problems with Android's browser. I can't even remember all of them.
- loumf 14y ago
  The difference is that iOS allows Mobile Safari to turn memory areas into code pages, which is what you need to do to JIT JavaScript. It doesn't trust other apps not to be able to exploit that somehow, so UIWebView is not allowed to do this.
  - z92 14y ago
    That explains a lot of things. Thank you.
  - chj 14y ago
    Are you 100% sure? I believe webkit (either in safari or UIWebView) should be able to run JIT, while your custom engine can't.
    - United857 14y ago
rimantas 14y ago
I'd say it depends more on app type than on HTML5 progress. For apps what are little more than glorified content viewers HTML is promising, for others — not so much. HTML5 brings some sanity and improvements, but at the roots it is still same old and lame HTML. You may spin and twist it, but at the end the question is "was it worth is". And the answer, most often than not is "hardly". Improving hardware won't change that, at least not substantially.
ArekDymalski 14y ago
Without context this partial quote makes deceptive buzz in general media and that's gonna hurt many people and businesses.
mbesto 14y ago
> Hardware gets better at a rapid rate and HTML5 (CSS, Javascript, etc) is still improving. Hardware is only improving as fast the vendors see a need to. If the ARM chips in a smartphone suffice for say 90% of the games produce on a iPhone, why on earth increase it's power? We all know (hopefully by now) that the HTML5 spec chews through CPU, especially when called in parallel requests. It's not advantageous for Apple to optimize the HTML5 spec, otherwise it decreases lock-in. Also, this is the same argument that happened in the 90's with desktop/laptops and only really has progressed now with the existence of modern browsers. The only way that this was possible was when telecommunication infrastructure was able to support always connected devices, which the late 90's and early 2000's has proven. We are almost there, but considering 3G (4G, LTE, or whatever) is still not 100% reliable, I don't see this happening anytime soon. I really think we are less "connected" (technologically speaking) than the general public gives us credit for.
- seanalltogether 14y ago
  Also core count is increasing, but raw speed per core really isn't. Multicore really doesn't help web rendering very much. Nearly all javascript out there is single threaded and most dom rendering is too.
  - VMG 14y ago
    > Nearly all javascript out there is single threaded and most dom rendering is too. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_worker http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_worker
    - gliese1337 14y ago
      That's really not a rebuttal. Yes, lots of browsers now support web workers. Yes, it is therefore possible to write multithreaded javascript. And that may become more common over time. But for now, the fact that it's possible does not change the fact that nearly all javascript is still single threaded.
      - 14y ago
NinjaWarrior 14y ago
> I think we all believe HTML5 has a great future. I don't. Absolutely not. I have a confidence HTML5 will fail in the end. > Hardware gets better at a rapid rate Moore's Law is about to over. We have no free lunch anymore. The next Intel CPU (Haswell) gets only 10% performance improvement at the same clock. And don't you hear our consumers complaining the battery life and the heat problem of their mobile devices? Things become worse on the coming wearable computers. I can't understand why HTML/CSS/JavaScript advocates are so optimistic about this point. And looks like people completely forgot the buzzword of a decade ago, "green computing". My simple question is, "Are you really a SOFTWARE engineer?" HARDWARE engineers will solve the problem. Hah! > HTML5 (CSS, Javascript, etc) is still improving. Yeah, at a deadly slow speed. There are many critical bugs which has been stuck for several years. I'm tired to wait them fixed. Apparently web standards became too complex and about to collapse. Many programmers completely forgot the KISS principle. Very sad.
- Pkeod 14y ago
  > I have a confidence HTML5 will fail in the end. When is the end? What will replace it in the browser? Will people stop using browsers? Why do you have confidence other than things are not perfect now? >optimistic Being optimistic makes people want to solve problems. Being pessimistic makes people think defeat is 100% likely so they never try to solve anything. Our games already work very well in HTML5. They "work" on an iPad 3, but we still make native versions because the technology we use, Monkey, allows us to very painlessly do so. On desktop, Chrome, Firefox, and IE all run the games perfectly on a now 4 year old computer build. I'm not betting everything on HTML5 but to me it already is succeeding and I am confident that consumers will drive demand for it, vendors will produce and release devices which support it. Even if Apple, or the other big sellers don't support it there will be those who do and the great support will sell units and make anyone who doesn't support it well look bad.
  - soup10 14y ago
    I believe you will always be able to make html5 apps if you want. But I believe the iOS 'apps' model is going to become the standard for consumer pc's. This will cause native apps to no longer be second class citizens, and HTML based apps will have to compete with native just like they do on iOS. Right now basically all consumer computing happens through the browser, except for ms office, and it takes enormous effort to get a non-technical user to install software.
jksmith 14y ago
Interestingly, once html5 becomes fully ubiquitous, Facebook will probably already be sliding no matter how well it's native apps run. Will be a non-issue in the end.

tokenizer 14y ago

As a web developer, this is a great thing to hear. Larger companies should focus on the web, and with this context, I don't have to be worried anymore about learning a native phone language.

ollysb 14y ago

"One of the things that’s interesting is we actually have more people on a daily basis using mobile Web Facebook..." this is testament to just how bad the app was.

deleted 14y ago
[deleted]
StavrosK 14y ago
Not only that. I use the mobile interface rather than the app for two reasons: Sure, the app is badly done and buggy, but, most importantly, it gives Facebook permissions that they've shown time and again they shouldn't have. They've fucked up on more than one occasion, and I know casual users who balk at installing applications that request too many permissions. That's definitely a contributing factor, in my opinion.
- omaranto 14y ago
  I haven't used iOS in a while, but a couple of years ago the web app was faster (!) and had more features (like liking on comments, not just on status updates) than the native app (presumably because the browser used a JIT for JavaScript and apps an interpreter). I would use the web app for everything except uploading pictures.
untog 14y ago
While some of the audience will be because of that, I doubt the majority are. Last time I checked, Facebook's mobile site actually degrades fantastically well, all the way down to old Nokia feature phones. You can bet that in many countries that is a big deal.
- army 14y ago
  Bingo. Outside of Tech Companies/Silicon Valley/Major US Metro Areas/the US as a whole, iPhones don't have that huge a market share. More people have Android phones, but often running old hardware, old software, and even more have feature phones. If you're reading Hacker News, forget that you're not a typical user at your peril.

goggles99 14y ago

His statement is calculated so he does not receive too much criticism from over-hyped HTML5 cool aid drinkers (which abound in great numbers). I see the wind starting to turn finally, it had been fairly steady since Steve Jobs hot air concerning HTML5.

markmm 14y ago

HTML5 is fine, but it's for developing web UI's not mobile apps. Sure it would be nice if all the main mobile OS's used the same language and frameworks but they don't, people need to get over that and start developing natively.

TheFuture 14y ago
It's the glittering lure of write-once run-everywhere. Devs still fall for it, even though we should know better.

gadders 14y ago

The main issue I had with the Android Facebook app wasn't that it was particularly bad in itself, it was just that it depended on a perfect, always on mobile data connection. These things need to work on an asynchronous basis, more like email, to get status updates, post to walls etc.

tonetheman 14y ago

Ha yeah context is not needed. HTML5 is nice but betting a billion dollar business on it does not seem like a great idea.

islon 14y ago

"One of the things that’s interesting is we actually have more people on a daily basis using mobile Web Facebook than we have using our iOS or Android apps combined." That's a hint of how crappy those native facebook apps are. It's barely usable.

kzahel 14y ago
That was the interesting part for me, too. I am confused that none of the other comments in this thread touch on that. At first I thought maybe there is a third class of phone that we are omitting, where there is no option for a native app, and so the browser is used. But I don't know what mobile device that would be. Certainly not a nokia phone (though maybe oneday!) I personally started using Safari on my iOS for gmail. The HTML5 experience is simply better than iOS native email experience.
myko 14y ago
I have the app on my phone which I use primarily for notifications and then browse touch.facebook.com to actually interact with people. The mobile app experience is that bad.

mmuro 14y ago

No, the context is irrelevant here because Techcrunch got it right. It's a direct quote.

pyrotechnick 14y ago

This is what HTML is capable of: http://ro.me http://ro.me

markmm 14y ago
I get "We are sorry, but it appears that your browser does not support WebGL. Please download Google Chrome and try launching this site again." Using Google Chrome
- tmh88j 14y ago
  Using chrome and it works for me. Absolutely amazing!
munimkazia 14y ago
> We are sorry, but it appears that your browser does not support WebGL. Please download Google Chrome and try launching this site again. Using google chrome 21.0.1180.89 on ubuntu 12.04
kalleboo 14y ago
Which doesn't work on any mobile device, which is what this quote is talking about.

se85 14y ago

All the context that is needed is said in the first sentence. To claim this was facebook's biggest mistake is surely one of the most ridiculous things i've ever seen or heard the guy say. edit: Mark Zuckerberg has his head up his arse :-)

rjzzleep 14y ago

who cares what zuckerberg said tbh, i doubt he wrote the html5 port and i doubt he was the one who convinced people to go back to native. he's just repeating what some engineer told him. fact is html5 is slow, even more so on none apple phones/tablets. everyone who's worked with it knows it.

dpham 14y ago

Context absolutely matters! Techcrunch sold the article as Facebook betting too much on HTML5, period. His quote was that at the time 2 years ago, it was a mistake betting too much on HTML5 over native for their mobile application. And it's true, 2 years ago and even now, most phones have a hard time handling Facebook's intensive need in HTML5. It's true, Facebook could have spent more engineering resources improving the HTML5 spec and push it forward, but anyone saying context doesn't matter is just being ignorant.

beerglass 14y ago

I guess what he really meant is hybrid apps (native apps with HTML 5 rendering inside them) are not ideal..

grandalf 14y ago

I think it was mostly the design of FB's mobile web app that was bad, not that it was made in HTML5. It was too heavy and didn't optimize well to the iPhone screen size.

francov88 14y ago

Context always matters. People always forget that a rush too quickly into things (kind of like Facebook and an emerging technology). However in the case of Facebook, the error was still made.

joshaidan 14y ago

"...One of the things that’s interesting is we actually have more people on a daily basis using mobile Web Facebook than we have using our iOS or Android apps combined. So mobile Web is a big thing for us." I find this part of the quote interesting. Those people who use mobile web, what platform are they using? Are they using iOS or Android based devices, and using the web? Or are they using other lower end phones? Could this number actually decrease if Facebook linked to the apps in their emails, rather than the mobile site? (I guess this might be hard to pull off, but would be better in the long run)

segmond 14y ago
I use mobile web facebook on android. i rather use mobile web for any site than their own app. I don't trust the apps to begin with, besides that, they take up space, cpu usage, battery, etc. so web is better, when i'm done, i close it.
loire280 14y ago
My girlfriend uses the mobile web version of Facebook on a semi-dumb slider phone (it might be some variant of Symbian). I find it baffling because the browser is so terrible and the screen is 320x240, but she's perfectly happy with it. She never uses it for any other sites. I wonder if Facebook has an unusually high number of users like that. The demographic would be invisible to the rest of the web community because those users never leave Facebook.
mcphilip 14y ago
I can't speak for others but I have an iPhone and choose to only access Facebook through the mobile site. Two reasons: 1. I prefer not to allow Facebook to run a native app on my phone. Various reasons boiling down to not trusting it to act in my best interest. 2. Poor performance of the iPhone app -- I hear the new version is supposed to be better but that still doesn't solve problem 1.
nicholassmith 14y ago
Facebook created a very specific version of their site for dumbphones a while ago, I think an article I saw about it said it was targeted at places like Africa etc where mobile phone use is becoming common, but computer usage isn't. Which makes perfect sense really, there's a much larger percentage of the worlds population that use phones over computers in less developed parts of the world. They're a growth segment, no point blocking them when you can hook them now. Edit: http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/free_mobile_facebook_with_0facebookcom.php http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/free_mobile_facebook_wi... there we go, Facebook Zero.

rburhum 14y ago

I am one of those people that had the native app installed and opted for using the web version instead. Why? We all know why!

lemiffe 14y ago

I think he could have phrased it better; Did anyone else think what he said is rather redundant? I don't think context is that important, it's all in the choice of words, and the relations in the discourse. If he failed, it was with making himself clear, not on the matter of HTML5 vs Native.

mindstab 14y ago
Maybe everyone doesn't have a constent quotable filter on thinking "is this quotable?" :P People talk poorly in normal conversation. It takes time to craft a good quote.

Zigurd 14y ago

That's a tautology: users prefer a Web interface over sucky apps. Which says fairly little about what user might prefer when the apps don't suck.

gubatron 14y ago

Issues I have with HTML5: - Javascript - Javascript - Javascript - Fragmentation like no other - Lack of APIs - Sandboxed environment - A bunch of morons writing "frameworks" without a clue of computer science (same thing as many popular Wordpress PHP plugins written by people who have no clue of even how memory allocation is supposed to work) - A bunch of other morons copying and pasting the work of other morons. - No real memory management - No real anything or poor support at anything (no sockets, no primitive types, no threads, cross domain BS) - Internet Explorer - Javascript - Internet Explorer - Javascript ... It's just not what the foundation was meant for. It only took Steve Jobs talking about how bad flash was and closing the endless array of development options that we have outside Objective-C and HTML5 to make the world try to reinvent the wheel in javascript, all the while ignoring the fact we have more powerful desktop computers than ever, all the while putting more money in the pockets of those that run cloud infrastructure. I hope more guys like Zuck come out on the record and let the world know this is ludacris, that all these decades working on out of this world compiler optimizations and technology that's light years away from the browser can't be forgotten. Yes, we need to be in the browser, but give me a break, Javascript? It's just sad seeing the turn of events of our industry going in this direction, I'm glad of this whole "App" revolution and Zuckerberg saying this at his first appearance after the IPO, I hope it sobers up a bunch of decision makers.

michaelmior 14y ago
I'm confused about the no sockets (WebSockets) and no threads (Web workers) points. These standards may be immature, but they do exist.
kcbanner 14y ago
Sockets exist, work, and are used by lots of people.
- Ryan_Shmotkin 14y ago
  And work on all browser for all people. Or wait.. they don't for most http://caniuse.com/websockets http://caniuse.com/websockets

gubatron 14y ago

Issues I have with HTML5: - Javascript - Javascript - Javascript - Fragmentation like no other - Lack of APIs - Sandboxed environment - No real memory management - No real anything or poor support at anything - Javascript It's just not what the foundation was meant for. It only took Steve Jobs talking about how bad flash was and closing the endless array of development options that we have outside Objective-C and HTML5 to make the world try to reinvent the wheel in javascript, all the while ignoring the fact we have more powerful desktop computers than ever, all the while putting more money in the pockets of those that run cloud infrastructure. I hope more guys like Zuck come out on the record and let the world know this is ludacris, that all these decades working on out of this world compiler optimizations and technology that's light years away from the browser can't be forgotten. Yes, we need to be in the browser, but give me a break, Javascript?

jpswade 14y ago

Zuckerberg is right. HTML5 isn't suitable for the direction Facebook is going which is photos (hence why they bought Instagram). LocalStorage quotas cannot be made bigger than 5MB[1]. I remember trying this Mozilla-built webapp[2] out in Google Chrome, it just didn't work. 1. http://htmlui.com/blog/2011-08-23-5-obscure-facts-about-html5-localstorage.html http://htmlui.com/blog/2011-08-23-5-obscure-facts-about-html... 2. https://hacks.mozilla.org/2010/02/an-html5-offline-image-editor-and-uploader-application/ https://hacks.mozilla.org/2010/02/an-html5-offline-image-edi...

anuraj 14y ago

HTML5 makes sense for what it is meant for. Web development. It is not a desktop or mobile app replacement technology. As long as one is clear about that, everything is fine.

natrius 14y ago
Part of HTML5's origin is a draft standard called Web Applications 1.0. HTML5 is meant to be a desktop and mobile app replacement technology. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HTML5#Standardization_process http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HTML5#Standardization_process
- anuraj 14y ago
  Intent do not always translate to reality. HTML5 does not deliver for mobile/desktop. End of story.
  - natrius 14y ago
    Plenty of products are successfully using HTML5 for applications where it makes sense and are succeeding with it. Blanket generalizations are usually wrong.
    - anuraj 14y ago
      I think you simply refuse to understand - a nail may be pinned using a pickaxe, but when you have a hammer available, which does the job neat , why would you go for the pickaxe? HTML5 is the pick axe which does the job ugly. Mobile developers have little reason to adopt it.

vco 14y ago

"One of the things that’s interesting is we actually have more people on a daily basis using mobile Web Facebook than we have using our iOS or Android apps combined." Yes, a lot of people used the FB mobile web app because Mobile Safari ran their web pages better than the web views of the old native FB app.

mullingitover 14y ago
Stole the words right outta my keyboard. There's a reason people are going back to the web site after trying the apps.

deleted 14y ago

[deleted]

whelps 14y ago

The Facebook app was soooooo slow. Perhaps some of that was due to not having a native app, but it seems like the back end API must have been slow as well.

akennberg 14y ago

I used to work on mobile products at Google using both, HTML5 for mobile and native. When betting on HTML5 you get the benefit of quick updates across multiple platforms and smaller team size. However, most of your time is allocated towards finding work arounds for strange browser bugs. Mostly glitches in the UI. With native, things work the right way most of the time, so you can quickly create exciting new features, which excites the team. The down side of native, is that you'll be implementing that exciting new features N number of times for each platform. Now that I am doing a lean startup, the reality is that the first app will be re-written completely. My bet is to focus short-term on one platform and write using native code for speed and lack of bugs (higher moral). For longer-term multi-platform play and if you plan to stay small and lean, I would recommend HTML5 or a hybrid.

cicero19 14y ago

I think HTML5 at the moment is great for making prototype mobile apps. Getting traction before investing in a native app hedges a lot of risk. The approach (native vs. web) also depends on the type of app and the customers you are trying to reach. There is a time and place for both and i think the times and places for HTML5 will only increase in the future.