Full quote of what Mark Zuckerberg actually said about HTML5

http://blog.tobie.me/post/31366970040/when-im-introspective-about-the-last-few-years-i

by ttaubert • 14 years ago

304 113 14 years ago

blog.tobie.me

melling• 14 years 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• 14 years 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.

elorant2• 14 years 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.

MatthewPhillips3• 14 years ago

> Facebook, for example, needs a 5 star app.

Could you explain why?

moystard3• 14 years 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.

kirillklimuk• 14 years ago

Probably the main reason that they have so much traffic going to the mobile website (aside from international audiences with dumbphones) is that the app sucks. My colleagues use the webapp on their androids because they hate the native app.

bad_user• 14 years 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.

loumf2• 14 years 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.

mbesto2• 14 years ago

> 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.

Vehemently disagree. I know very few apps that are flawless and reliable, including Apple's native apps. A couple of users have already publicly criticized the app for YEARS now and it hasn't hurt their reputation to the point where they are losing users. Facebook has power because of the network effect. People are willing to deal with a flawed experience as long as the network effect is left in tact. Facebook will need to worry about a flawless app experience when the network effect diminishes.

Joeri2• 14 years ago

iOS6 adds file upload support for images.

What I don't get is why facebook has to be an app at all. If you build it as a purely browser-based app, you can get better performance than running it in a UIWebView, and updates can be pushed out without anyone's permission. With HTML5 app cache you can get the "instant launch" experience that a native app gives you. For interacting with the camera they could have used a helper app.

Why are people so desperate to put their free non-ad-supported apps in apple's app store? It doesn't make any sense to me. I recently built an offline web app using sencha touch, and it works great. No install necessary, just "add to homescreen".

23david• 14 years ago

IMHO, HTML5 isn't the issue. It's just a convenient scapegoat to distract investors from the fact that they either lack technical prowess in mobile app development (fairly unlikely...) or simply have poor leadership, vision and direction to deal with the challenges of mobile apps. To succeed in mobile, Facebook needs their own ecosystem.

Apple, Google and Amazon are years ahead of Facebook at this point and they have a tremendous upper hand right now. I don't see how Facebook can continue their growth in the current post-PC world. They've basically peaked at this point with their facebook.com site, and for future growth my bet is that they'll start growing through acquisitions. Sounds like yahoo.com to me.

rimantas• 14 years 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• 14 years ago

Without context this partial quote makes deceptive buzz in general media and that's gonna hurt many people and businesses.

mbesto2• 14 years 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• 14 years 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.

NinjaWarrior• 14 years 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• 14 years 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.

jksmith• 14 years 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• 14 years 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• 14 years 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.

StavrosK• 14 years 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• 14 years 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• 14 years 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.

army2• 14 years 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.

par• 14 years ago

This is what I came to say as well. The native apps lacked so much functionality that you would have to go to the web app to perform certain actions.

goggles99• 14 years 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.

markmm2• 14 years 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• 14 years ago

It's the glittering lure of write-once run-everywhere.

Devs still fall for it, even though we should know better.

gadders• 14 years 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• 14 years 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• 14 years 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• 14 years 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.

myko2• 14 years 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• 14 years ago

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

pyrotechnick• 14 years ago

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

markmm2• 14 years 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• 14 years ago

Using chrome and it works for me. Absolutely amazing!

munimkazia• 14 years 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• 14 years ago

Which doesn't work on any mobile device, which is what this quote is talking about.

se85• 14 years 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• 14 years 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• 14 years 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• 14 years ago

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

grandalf• 14 years 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• 14 years 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• 14 years 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)

loire280• 14 years 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• 14 years 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• 14 years 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_wi... there we go, Facebook Zero.

rburhum• 14 years 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• 14 years 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• 14 years 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• 14 years 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• 14 years ago

Issues I have with HTML5:

- 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• 14 years 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• 14 years ago

Sockets exist, work, and are used by lots of people.

Ryan_Shmotkin• 14 years ago

And work on all browser for all people.

Or wait.. they don't for most

http://caniuse.com/websockets

flatline3• 14 years ago

They're not sockets, they're WebSockets, and they require a custom HTTP server setup just to open a socket connection to a service.

This means that I can't do something that should be really simple -- like open a VNC connection to a remote server -- without first configuring an HTTP WebSocket proxy.

amix• 14 years ago

I can't believe this biased and unintelligent rant is being upvoted. HTML5 does not suck because of JavaScript, or because of using greedy algorithms, or because people allocate too much memory. It sucks because browser support isn't there and Apple/Google/MS does not give a damn about HTML5. And if you think about it, it makes sense, it's much better for Apple/Google/MS that developers develop exclusively for their platforms and not for HTML5 (a platform that could be run on any OS).

What we need is an independent browser vendor (Opera, Mozilla) to do an amazing HTML5 experience.

mirsadm• 14 years ago

The story of the web up until now: It sucks because browser X doesn't support technology Y correctly.

randomdata• 14 years ago

The thing about HTML5 is that it does not enforce any real design patterns, so if you are not very careful with the design of your application, it will quickly become a horrible mess. I expect that is where the parent's disdain is coming from.

Interestingly, when you do introduce design patterns in your HTML5 app, it starts to very closely resemble a native application. At that point, there is little advantage to using HTML5 over native environments from a developer's perspective. The only real win from HTML5 being its ubiquity.

williamcotton• 14 years ago

There is a world of interesting opportunities available in an ecosystem where code is pushed, interpreted, and executed on the client.

For example, when I'm working with audio software I frequently use VST audio plugins in my projects. Unfortunately, my projects aren't very portable because they require the same plugins to be installed on another machine in order to open that project. When you can't control the dependencies that may or may not exist on someone's machine, you have a really annoying ecosystem. Most professional software environments suffer from this.

If instead, my DAW software was running based completely on sandboxed code executed locally but being served up remotely, then I can move from machine to machine effortlessly and collaborate incredibly easily with other producers and musicians. Of course, this is not the only use case.

Also, the browser and JavaScript don't HAVE to be the way forward, but there is a massive amount of momentum and very few competitors with any sort of traction.

Also, read up, son: Websockets, Web Workers, CORS, WebGL, Web Audio API, WebRTC, MediaStream API, DataStream API.

The approach is to maintain the sandbox and therefore allow arbitrary code to be run while increasing the number of hardware accelerated interfaces to the machine.

jrabone• 14 years ago

But isn't that really licensing requirements, rather than technical requirements? Or the 20+GB sample libraries that things like Superior Drummer haul around? I don't see how you could remote-serve that kind of content, any more than you could, say, Skyrim. Now, remote rendering MIDI data and streaming back the audio might work, but I use many VST plugins as real-time processors (amp sims etc.) Knowing how much effort I've sunk into optimising everything on this computer for real-time playable latencies without glitching, I'm having a hard time believing that the Web Audio API is going to cut it for my use case, unless it's basically just ASIO. There simply isn't much opportunity for any buffering at 5ms latency, so that "sandbox" might end up sharing memory rather a lot...

user243• 14 years ago

JavaScript:

There's nothing wrong with JavaScript. It's a beautiful, powerful language if you know it.

Fragmentation:

Seriously? One code-base with a few cross-device tweaks is, in my opinion, infinitely better than n native apps. Just because n is currently 2 does not make it scaleable.

Lack of APIs:

I don't know what you mean by this.

Sandboxes:

That's a feature not a bug

Morons:

You get that everywhere.

Memory management:

Ditto.

Poor support:

That's really just a rant against JS again isn't it? Cross domain "BS" is easily solved with allow-origin, and if you don't own the 3rd party server then you really shouldn't be programatically accessing it.

IE:

Meh, it's not as bad as it was. Nor is it popular enough to make it worth worrying about for lots of people.

kbolino• 14 years ago

There's nothing wrong with JavaScript. It's a beautiful, powerful language if you know it.

All numbers are 64-bit double-precision floating-point. Interacting with binary protocols or cryptographic libraries is painful.

All strings are UCS-2, not true UTF-16. Characters outside the BMP are second-class citizens.

Those are two issues that I can think of in JavaScript-the-language. The most common use of JavaScript-the-stack, providing interactive functionality in a web browser, is riddled with gotchas like bizarre inconsistencies and arcane corner cases.

That's not to say that you can't do great things with JavaScript (plenty of evidence for that), or that the situation isn't changing (Mozilla added arrays of all the various integral types, but the individual elements still get treated as floating-point when extracted). But you have to be very careful (or use a framework made by someone who was careful), which IMHO makes it anything but "beautiful".

rdtsc2• 14 years ago

> There's nothing wrong with JavaScript.

"Beautiful if you it" know also means "this is the only thing I know and the only thing that is viable so I might as well like it".

Was it hailed as a beautiful language when it came out? Why not? I don't remember accolades written about it. Oh because it is the only thing that runs on the browser. Those two things are orthogonal and one doesn't follow from the other no matter how much we try to make it that way.

> Seriously? One code-base with a few cross-device tweaks is, in my opinion, infinitely better than n native apps.

Users don't care how many languages or how many tweaks your product code has. If it is slow to render, it flickers, if it takes forever to do its job, it is shit and it gets thrown away, regardless if it is written in Backbone.js or Ember.js, Haskell, or COBOL. It doesn't matter. That was the point.

jpswade• 14 years 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-html...

2. https://hacks.mozilla.org/2010/02/an-html5-offline-image-edi...

anuraj3• 14 years 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.

natrius2• 14 years 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

anuraj3• 14 years ago

Intent do not always translate to reality. HTML5 does not deliver for mobile/desktop. End of story.

vco• 14 years 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• 14 years ago

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

akennberg• 14 years 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• 14 years 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.

Full quote of what Mark Zuckerberg actually said about HTML5

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