top | item 4375080

Web vs. iOS. Choppy vs. smooth. Free vs. paying.

4 points| devinrhode2 | 13 years ago | reply

I'm just annoyed at the quality of the web, the accepted standard is all choppy

and not smooth. Most of the web would be completely unacceptable by iOS standards.

Yet we continue with a remarkably similar state to our past.

"Well if the web is soo choppy, point out some examples"

Sure. Off the top of my head...

Github: We love reloading pages.

Linode: "Unleash your inner geek" ..

...and find yourself complaining on HN about the <img> tags with no width and height attributes! (http://www.linode.com/tour/)

Design principal: Humans are very sensitive to movement,

so please make sure your pages don't twitch when the user loads them. Let's up the standards of the web.

The fact that iOS is soo much smoother than the web doesn't contribute much to why iOS is soo much more profitable,

but you can the fact most of the web is choppy doesn't help when we want users to pay for our web apps.

5 comments

order
[+] whichdan|13 years ago|reply
GitHub is a poor example, since it has an excellent usage of history.pushState and slide transitions for navigating repos.

If anything, blame Apple for cripping web apps when you add them to your homescreen.

[+] saurik|13 years ago|reply
GitHub's usage of history.pushState with a simultaneous lack of on-page DOM caching causes back/forward sequences to be painfully and epically slow as it destroys the browser's page cache (note: I don't mean the request cache); this is painfully evident if you go to a page like Homebrew's formula list[1], click to another page, and attempt go to back: everything locks up for a few seconds as the webpage painfully attempts to re-compose and re-render the massive document that a normal Web 1.0 era website would have been able to re-render nigh unto instantaneously as it would have been in the page cache.

[1] https://github.com/mxcl/homebrew/tree/master/Library/Formula