Performance of Web Apps Saved to Home Screen Hampered in iOS 4.3

[mfulton]

It has been said many times in this thread but I feel that it has to be said again. If you and the person who wrote this macrumors article, had read the original source article properly, you would understand that this is not the case.

In 99% of cases, saving a web page to your homescreen will simply create a bookmark that will open that URL in safari. It does not launch a special application that has been purposefully made inferior.

Did you read the original article in the Register? It says nothing of the kind. The very first line of the Register article states:

Apple's iOS mobile operating system runs web applications at significantly slower speeds when they're launched from the iPhone or iPad home screen in "full-screen mode" as opposed to in the Apple Safari browser

It doesn't say "half", or "some" or "1%"... That is an UNQUALIFIED statement that is neither contradicted nor qualified by ANYTHING in the remainder of the article. You may be correct that this only affects 1% of all cases, and in fact I certainly hope that you are, but that's simply not stated in the original article.

 

[andrea.campi]

FWIW, this post (in italian, via Google translation) has a bit more details.

It comes to the same conclusion as the original article: that is, UIWebView and Home Screen are both slower than Safari in 4.3 (although quite interestingly UIWebView in a custom app is faster); and both perform exactly the same as in iOS 4.2.

This dispels the notion that has circulated elsewhere on the internet, that the target SDK might make a difference (that is, someone suggested that targeting iOS 4.3 would get you Nitro).

What's puzzling is that the Simulator performs exactly the same no matter what; OTOH it's so fast that there may be some measurement error.


Full disclosure: Marco, the author of that post, works in my team.