Modern Web Development

Re:Modern Web Development by untog on Monday April 23, 2012 @05:23PM (#3881041)

It's true- I've spent a lot of time developing HTML5-based apps (i.e. in a webview) and am already surprised at how much worse the Android web engine is than the iOS one. Google should be all over this (and with the release of Chrome of Android, perhaps they finally are) but it baffles me that it took this long. Meanwhile, it took Mozilla to create Boot To Gecko, a true web OS.

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Re:Modern Web Development by monteslu on Monday April 23, 2012 @06:49PM (#3881389)

The Chrome beta on ICS is great, but it's only accessible to <4% of all android devices. ICS has been out for months, and the providers are completely dragging their feet on it.

Chrome Beta needs to be backported to at least 2.3

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Re:Modern Web Development by untog on Monday April 23, 2012 @06:52PM (#3881402)

AFAIK it also doesn't make any difference to apps that use webviews. I mean, it's just as well- if you changed the underlying engine without notifying devs insanity would ensue. But it would be good to be able to set a flag that says "use the decent engine".

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Re:Modern Web Development by monteslu on Monday April 23, 2012 @06:57PM (#3881431)

You're correct. But no reason google couldn't add a ChromeWebView lib as part of the install of the new browser for PhoneGap to wrap.

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Re:Modern Web Development by nzonbi on Monday April 23, 2012 @11:37PM (#3882294)

Or google could integrate chrome web-apps/NaCL into android, as first class apps.

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Re:Modern Web Development by DavidAbrams on Monday April 23, 2012 @10:38PM (#3882175)

"ICS has been out for months, and the providers are completely dragging their feet on it."

Can anyone explain why this is such a problem? Does Android not have a proper hardware abstraction layer or driver model that would allow OS updates immediately, as long as these layers remained compatible and a build existed for your processor family?

Windows has supported disparate hardware configurations for many, many years. Yet, generally, you can run out and buy the new version and install it. Why can't Android do this (albeit with a version for each processor)?

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Re:Modern Web Development by varikin on Monday April 23, 2012 @11:50PM (#3882326)

Many providers have customized the OS for the look and feel along with adding their custom apps and settings including locking out tethering. One of the big advantages of 3.0 was it was suppose to provide an easier way to separate out the look and feel out of the OS so the providers didn't need to create a custom OS. This make pushing out updates very difficult.

For example, I worked on an app to be included with the device by the OEM. The OEM had roll a custom OS and kernel to handle their hardware and replace/update the mail and calender app because they are very tied to Google by default. We needed hooks into the the mail and calendar app in ways that are not supported by Google so the OEM also had to add those hooks for us. At this point, we were deep into unsupported territory by Google, but supported by the OEM. These things change unexpectedly with minor OS updates from Google which make them brittle to maintain. An update to a newer OS would be a hell of a lot of work.

All that said, if we could have based off of 3.0 instead of 2.3, many of these issues would not exist because of some abstraction layers added just for this purpose. I expect 4.0 to make that even nicer.

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Re:Modern Web Development by DavidAbrams on Tuesday April 24, 2012 @05:47AM (#3883161)

Thanks. At least there's some indication that it's getting better.

Too bad the providers have to degrade the experience with their crap, instead of just providing additional apps if they feel it's necessary.

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Re:Modern Web Development by pcwalton on Tuesday April 24, 2012 @02:03AM (#3882662)

For one thing, last I looked, Chrome Beta requires the GL_OES_egl_image extension for off-thread texture upload, and had support for the ICS-only SurfaceTexture (although judging by the WebKit source that's ifdef'd out). GL_OES_egl_image support is very spotty on pre-ICS devices.

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