On: Integrate PWAs into Native Sharing UIs with Workbo...

[saagarjha]

PWAs are generally significantly lighter, size wise, than Electron.

[thefounder → saagarjha]

They are also significantly less powerful(i.e you can't even make a http request if the target doesn't whitelist you)

[me551ah → saagarjha]

But the overhead of a dynamic language like javascript is always going to be much higher than Swift/Java.

[saagarjha → me551ah]

Technically, this isn't always true. But in general the overhead of using JavaScript isn't the actual blocker for making good UI experiences for a platform.

[me551ah → saagarjha]

Javascript is only one of the aspects. With native apps you also get Hardware-accelerated GPU rendering on UI controls. Thus making the UI appear a lot smoother.

While mobile browsers accelerate some parts of a webpage using GPUs, most parts of a webpage are not. This is due to the huge amount of complexity in layouts on a typical webpage. Same is true even for most desktop browsers, with the exception of Firefox when you use WebRender on a supported nVidia GPU ( but even that is in beta).

This is the reason why Google built flutter like a game engine, so that it could use the additional GPU horsepower on mobile apps to make UI appear more smoother and natural.

[fauigerzigerk → me551ah]

I thought both Flutter and Chrome use Skia for rendering. Does that not result in comparable GPU acceleration?