The reason HTML5 apps have proven not to be a full replacement for native apps is that no-one has actually tried it (on the OS side). Apple (weirdly) have come the closest, but there's still a hell of a long way to go. From my personal experience making webapps, the following is needed:
- Some sort of app store like central place of discovery
- Access to far more native APIs / intents. Control over elements like the keyboard.
- Fixed positioning (finally arrived in iOS5, not sure about Android)
- The ability to actually play an audio file correctly
- More control over video playing
That's just a short list but it goes on and on. There's absolutely no reason why an HTML5-based app can't be as good as a native one. I think that Mozilla are ideally placed to be the ones to try. I'm still amazed/disappointed that Google haven't.
2. Getting there in Firefox OS, already impressive.
3. Not sure what you mean here... "fixed positioning" without context makes me cringe. (edit: Oh... position: fixed has been available in Android browser and Chrome for Android for... a long time. I'm sure it's in Gecko [that, and the demo shows Twitter who uses position: fixed])
4. Not sure what that means, but I'd like to think it's a priority.
5. Popcorn.js, while I'm not a fan, is something Mozilla is pouring effort into. MediaSource API coming out of Google looks to add an appendBytes (ala Flash) style API to Javascript enabling adaptive streaming.
- Some sort of app store like central place of discovery
- Access to far more native APIs / intents. Control over elements like the keyboard.
- Fixed positioning (finally arrived in iOS5, not sure about Android)
- The ability to actually play an audio file correctly
- More control over video playing
That's just a short list but it goes on and on. There's absolutely no reason why an HTML5-based app can't be as good as a native one. I think that Mozilla are ideally placed to be the ones to try. I'm still amazed/disappointed that Google haven't.