It may seem a bit strange that I talk about Android. After all I am a web developer and I have been actively promoting Web for mobile development. But after a course I have been taking, I wanted to share some thoughts.
Mobile proxy browsers are coming back. For a long time we had Opera Mini. And these days we have seen the release of Opera Beta for Android and an update to Chrome Beta for Android, both highlighting data compression features. And they are not the only ones. About a year ago Amazon introduced their Silk browser with a similar proxy solution to Google’s.
On desktop, although this feature hasn’t become that popular due to the higher bandwidth that is usually available, Opera also had presence with their Opera Turbo feature.
Mobile web apps are not at the same level of native ones. Until browsers don’t implement HTML5 API specifications to access device hardware (device API, audio, video), implement push notifications, and improve general performance (animations, scroll) web apps will not be able to deliver the experience that can’t be reach through native development.
However, there are some advantages when taking a webapp first approach for mobile development.
You can find a demo showing the default behaviour and the one using Facebook’s technique. Use an iPhone or iPod Touch to see the effect.
When clicking a link for ajax navigation on iPhone and iPod Touch, the navigation bar slides down and up for every link, even when they are enhanced to support ajax navigation and its click event is captured and we load content using XMLHttpRequest instead.