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Zuckerberg: Betting On HTML5 Was Facebook's Biggest Mistake
An anonymous reader writes "Speaking yesterday at TechCrunch Disrupt, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg acknowledged that the company's stock performance was disappointing. He also made an interesting remark about Facebook's development efforts over the past couple of years: 'The biggest mistake we made as a company was betting too much on HTML5 as opposed to native. It just wasn't ready.' According to Mashable, 'the benefits of cross-platform development weren't enough to outweigh the downsides of HTML5, which pulls in data much more slowly than native code, and is much less stable. ... Now, Zuckerberg says, Facebook is focused on continuing to improve the native mobile experience on iOS, as well as bringing a native app to Android.'"
Zuckerberg meant: The IPO Was Facebook's Biggest Mistake.
There, fixed that for him.
...gis sdrawkcab (usually not responding to ACs; don't bother posting as AC)
"Zuckerberg: Betting On HTML5 Was Facebook's Biggest Mistake For The iOS App". Company-wise, their IPO certainly was a bigger mistake than using HTML5 in iOS.
I wish that guy would take a hike... As for his comment, well, let's see him come up with a markup language standard that appeases every vendor while supporting every aspect of media delivery for users. That's not an easy task. Say what you want about the consortium, but what they did in the amount of time they did it in is rather impressive... These things are done in baby steps--but their efforts delivered more than this. Just because HTML5 might have wrinkles to iron out doesn't mean that it's a failed endeavor. Rather, it means that the browsers, companies behind said browsers, and the users have created a massive cluster of epic proportions. The consortium is just trying to make everything more accessible while accommodating for everyone. Again, not an easy task at all.
The w3c started out describing how web browsers worked and somehow they mistakenly decided they were a standards board. They still get ignored. They will always be ignored fro connivence.
Ooooh. What the article MEANS is "betting on HTML5 as a MOBILE strategy instead of writing native SMARTPHONE applications was a mistake." That's much less broad. Also, as HTML5 is still in its infancy and not yet a finished standard, I think it's kind of early to make this statement.
So not any of FB's many privacy "mistakes" then?
Zuckerberg isn't dumb. This judgement on the whole HTML 5 craze goes to show. Techwise HTML5/CSS3/Ajax is a huge step backwards compared to other approaches, like, for instance, Flash. Flash is proprietary and invites doing all kinds of non-sense (sic), but it *is* a far better x-platform VM.
Going HTML5 is not to be triffled with and will bog down your systems performance way further than other VM solutions such as Java or Flash/AS. Any web developer worth his salt could have told Zuckerberg that.
The "problem" (lets just call it that for now) here is that geeks, i.e. opinion leaders, are willing to make huge technological concessions if the technology is more open than the alternatives. Some devs would rather chop their right arm off than develop against (semi)prorietary systems like iOS or countless versions of Android. Hence we've got native looking apps, that are web UIs in disguise, slowpoking about at speeds we know from Windows 95 Applikations back in the day. I presume Zuckerberg got himself talked into this by his devleads, who are, just like any respectable geek, probably way more concerned with system openess and anti-lock-in development wise than with business critical performance and end-user experience issues. That's my guess anyway.
You can say and think what you want about Zuckerberg and Facebook - I dislike the whole direction thinks have taken with this FB thing just as much as the next geek - but his conclusion is spot on. He's a developer himself and it's to his credit that he recongnises where his company bet on the wrong technology. You have to give him credit for that.
My 2 cents.
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
"'the benefits of cross-platform development weren't enough to outweigh the downsides of HTML5, which pulls in data much more slowly than native code," Pulls in data much more slowly?
Is he talking overhead of HTTP headers? Handshaking on websockets?
The worst part of the facebook app has been the fact that when you load it up it wipes out the screen of any data you had last time, then pulls in a full new set over a crappy mobile network connection which very often timed out. Had the app cached (HTML5 localStorage?) postings and displayed what you already had, while trying to get new ones, it would have been much more useful.
He can blame HTML5 all he wants, but poor design decisions could be made for any language and platform.
"If they have both, tell them we use Linux. And if they have that, tell them the computers are down." -Dave Chapelle
What you're saying is "I don't need it, so nobody needs it". I hope you know how stupid that sounds.
I'm Rocco. I'm the +5 Funny man.
“When I’m introspective about the last few years I think the biggest mistake that we made, as a company, is betting too much on HTML5 as opposed to native because it just wasn’t there. And it’s not that HTML5 is bad. I’m actually, on long-term, really excited about it. 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.”
Anything that causes pain for Zuckerberg is fine by me.
Yeah! Go HTML5!
http://www.readwriteweb.com/mobile/2011/09/how-facebook-mobile-was-design.php
TL;DR:
If you think that's an HTML5 approach, I have some lean agile behavior-driven coaching hours for which I'd like to bill you.
Facebook is a webpage, not a 3D game that pushes the hardware. Is it possible he is blaming the technology for the failure of his coders? After all, we're talking about an app that when you viewed the comments on a photo you had to back out and come back several times in order for it to "refresh". Or sometimes clicking on a friend's name would take you to an entirely unrelated part of the app. And photos would take ages to load. Sometimes entering in a comment would work, sometimes it would say "you can't comment on something that doesn't exist" even though you could open up Facebook on a desktop computer and make a comment in the same place without a problem. I don't know of any other "webpage" app on the iPhone that performed that poorly, and granted I don't know what the Google+ app used but in comparison it blew the doors off of the Facebook app. Was it really the technology to blame?
So that's it? Snotty but successfull kid declares html5 a toss and that's it? I've noticed a few other people making comments that they're disappointed by html5. Its a bit early to make that determination yet I think.
Python: 'And then suddenly you have a language which says "we're all stuck with whatever the whiniest coder wants".'
Do your homework and your HTML5 implementation wont suck.
who prays for Satan? Who in 18 centuries has had the humanity to pray for the 1 sinner that needed it most? ~Mark Twain
Iunno, I found it ironic that when Flash first came out, it was a way to create and inbed animation and sound into a website with very little weight. I actually used to make Flash sites actually smaller than HTML ones with raster graphics.
Then everyone decided to make Flash sites really heavy. Instead of going the route I thought it would go. The computers and the internet back then were too slow to handle those sites.
Now that we have the bandwidth and computing power, everyone seems to be bashing on Flash. When it is the best developer tool for vector based animation around. It's all backwardsy to me. I didn't expect it to be such a big deal that Adobe bought Macromedia.
"HTML5 is roughly equivalent to Java as far as a multi-platform programming language and development platform."
No, not in the slightest. Not even close
"The only successful approach I've ever encountered to using a virtual machine was employed by the Digitalk VM which cached successive VM invocations so that you ran at native 'raw iron" machine speeds after encountering the performance hit the first and only time an pseudo-instruction was executed in a method.".
When did you last read anything about the JVM? 1995?
"The lethal performance problems that WordPerfect encountered trying to implement their suite of office products in Java still apply."
No, no they don't. That was the best part of a decade before Hotspot even came along, which was basically a complete rewrite.
You could've typed your post about 15 years ago, and you might've had a point. Now however, your post makes absolutely no sense, and shows an understanding that only someone who had literally been living under a rock for 15 years would have. Java has changed a lot since 1997, and your criticism is nonsensical in the context of those changes.
Why would a billion dollar company bet on anything in this manner?
If there was technical uncertainty before they embarked on the HTML5 route - why wouldn't they have done extensive feasibility testing before commencing? Lord knows they have the resources.
FB isn't developed by dumb or naive people - unless there's a realistic answer to this, I guess we can only assume he's bad-mouthing HTML5 for his own (nefarious) purposes.
HTML5, which pulls in data much more slowly than native code
How can this be? HTML5 is not relegated to some throttled network interface. the data all comes through the same pipe. I've made plenty of html5 implementations that had small streamlined exchanges of data with the server. My observations indicate that the facebook apps just pull in obscene amounts of unoptimized crap.
Well, since it's facebook data, i guess no implementation can get around the fact that you are pulling down crap.
Really? Betting on HTML5 was Facebook's biggest mistake? You sure about that?
I see dead pixels!
You can usually tell an app which is implemented in HTML5 because it just doesn't behave the way a native app does. Either the fonts are wrong, or it feels sluggish, or the menus are different, or the keyboard is inappropriate for the context or it's just off in some other way. I'm not surprised at all that a company with the resources of Facebook struggles to unify all the disparate HTML5 implementations on all the disparate operating systems and devices. There are probably so many differences, glitches and performance issues that perhaps they may have been better off using some other technology.
You badly, badly misremember the awfulness of MySpace. Please don't make me post this more than once, the memories are painful...
Embedded Flash objects in the page. Lots of them. All set to auto-play when the page loads. Facebook doesn't allow embedding arbitrary content, and doesn't allow auto-playing video on your page either.
Incredibly atrocious CSS, like text that ballooned to 40pt on hover or that was in incredibly unreadable fonts, or covered up / replaced navigation links on the page... Facebook doesn't allow custom styling.
I'm not sure if this is the fault of ColdFusion or just of MySpace programmers being incredibly shitty, but every 5-10 navigations on MySpace would usually result in a server error. Sometimes, you'd get a server error when the server tried to serve the error page! Facebook has had occasional stability issues, and PHP is lame (but then, apparently very little of their backend is still PHP), but it's rock-solid by comparison.
Back when MySpace was hemmorhaging users to Facebook, there was a limit on the number of pictures you could host on MySpace. Considering that one of the main uses of Facebook for some people seems to be "host every single picture my phone can take" you can see why this appeals.
Strange though it may be to think of Facebook and security together, they beat the pants off MySpace, which has such glamorous characteristics as being the first site to host an in-the-wild XSS worm (because it was trivial to inject script into your page, and somebody figured out how to exploit that).
There's no place I could be, since I've found Serenity...
There was no need to release the crappy HTML5 based app. The previous version was adequate. Maybe it didn't have all the features facebook would have liked, but it had the essential ones people wanted to use from their smartphones. Facebook doesn't rely on having the most sophisticated software.
The incredible badness of the app should have been obvious from testing, and they should have rewritten it as a native app intead of releasing it.
Am I missing something in this whole timeline-hate thing? Aren't 99.9% of all users spending 99.9% of their time in the "news feed" view of facebook? That didn't change with timeline? For me, a timeline only appears on the profile page, a page I don't really see a point in visiting.
Zuckerberg didn't say HTML5 wasn't ready. They stuck in a mashable quote hoping to make it look like it was Zuckerbergs.
Zuckerberg did say native but he was clearly talking about mobile apps (which are of course native).
C'mon Slashdot, that kind of stuff really makes you look bad.