Matteo Spinelli

I would be more concerned about the memory consumption (especially on mobile).

On ios in particular I recall[1] something about jpg taking up significantly more than their file size in memory, due to decoding the image. png's don't suffer from that (an ios optimization for pngs or something), but they tend to be overall larger for big files (retina size).

I would think webp.js would be even worse off than jpg in regard to memory usage for mobile devices. (note: this is just a guess/hunch though. I saw no data one way or the other on the linked post, nor on the libwebp site).

[1]: Maybe a fellow HN'er knows more about this particularity with regard to ios image memory consumption.

edit: found this: http://cubiq.org/testing-memory-usage-on-mobile-safari which appears to rebut the jpg/png memory discrepancy. Perhaps our particular app was doing something odd with the jpg images we were testing, that was causing the additional memory usage. Maybe it had to do with loading in the actual jpg decoding code itself (png perhaps already loaded?).

edit2: this article seems to confirm it: http://mobile.tutsplus.com/tutorials/mobile-design-tutorials/mobile-design_png-or-jpg/

subtext: test test test! :P

true, infinite scrolling and footer do not work together, unless footer is position:fixed, which is often the case on mobile. Infinite scrolling is pretty much the norm on mobile and is increasingly popular on desktop, pinterest and twitter are examples.

I have found only a couple of libraries that attempt some of the techniques used by LinkedIn team. One is [infinity.js](http://airbnb.github.io/infinity/) by airbnb but it is specific to pinterest-style masonry layouts, and another is [swipeview.js](http://cubiq.org/swipeview) by Matteo Spinelli, the great guy who created iscroll.js. We are using swipeview in [Urbini](http://github.com/urbien/urbini) but it is not good enough, scrolling is terribly slow. It is possible that it is some problem in interaction between jquery mobile and swipeview, so we are investigating it, but anyway swipeview is not even close to what LinkedIn guys have created. I know Sencha guys have a similar technique, [Infinite List Component](www.sencha.com/blog/the-making-of-fastbook-an-html5-love-story) but we do not want to use Sencha as it has terrible cross-browser support compared to JQM.

I never said anything about "lack of access to capabilities". Native applications, in the vast majority of cases, are just better in every way than the similar web versions. They're faster, cleaner, and more capable. If both are being offered, it makes no sense to choose the web version.

My company makes an iOS-compatible web application with no plans for a native client right now. We use some JavaScript[1] to remind users to add us to their homescreen. But if we had the resources, we would build a native client -- it's a no brainer.

[1] http://cubiq.org/add-to-home-screen

http://cubiq.org/project-underpants-explained - browser fingerprinting demo, they say flash being off reduces your anonymity.

You can measure fonts using JS to avoid having to have flash to do font based fingerprinting, eg http://www.lalit.org/lab/javascript-css-font-detect/. There's also the option to attempt to set the font and then get the style of the element and see if it's using the new font (works only on FF and Opera IIRC), eg http://www.quirksmode.org/dom/getstyles.html).