Thursday, September 27, 2018

The web browser can replace many resource-heavy smartphone apps

In a reply on a heavily-commented Slashdot article.

A web browser can supplant individual apps, because I suspect, that each such large-scale app simply comes equipped with its own WebKit/Blink rendering engine to support all the functionality that the default rendering engine might not have on an Android phone due to it being more outdated than the latest version of app.



A browser with an adblocker, or a Gecko-based browser with NoScript is also one of the solutions in fending off big apps and script-heavy sites. Many large services also have lite versions of their social (Facebook) and e-mail (GMail, Yahoo, AOL) front-ends; and on desktop, YouTube has a "lite" version with the ?disable_polymer=1 URL parameter.



In fact, Flash was a much better solution for older computers, because HTML5 playback is baked into the browser process in Firefox, and HTML5 playback was always interfered with even through simply resizing the browser window. Because Flash was out-of-process in plugin-container.exe, I could elevate its priority a notch using Process Explorer in Windows. That essentially guaranteed hiccup-free playback with Flash 18 and Firefox 39.0. This was probably an unintended, or accidental feature that software developers created, but welcome nevertheless.



The trouble starts with very interactive functionality in comms apps, where video and audio are required. Resource-intensive games are in a category of their own, as they have always been on desktop.

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