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Back in March, we noted that Safari speed improvements in iOS 4.3 brought about by the addition of a new Nitro JavaScript engine did not extend to web apps launched from the home screen, meaning that webpages launched from convenient home screen icons exhibit significantly slower performance than those exact same pages loaded manually or from bookmarks within Safari.
As noticed by CNET, a thread on Hacker News shares that iOS 5 does in fact provide home screen web apps with access to the Nitro capabilities, making them comparable to their directly-loaded counterparts.
Q: Did they fix the bug from 4.3 where home screen web apps don't use Nitro?
A: This is probably breaking my NDA to say this, but yes, they did. Web.app now has the "dynamic-codesigning" entitlement, which enables Nitro.
The thread goes on to reveal that the Nitro implementation does not extend to web pages loaded within other apps that take advantage of UIWebView to provide browser functionality without redirecting users out of the app and into Safari directly. That omission is reportedly due to restrictions that prevent the Nitro entitlement from being extended to all apps for security reasons.
Top Rated Comments
How many people save bookmarks to their home screen?
Macrumors has been on my home screen since I got the iPhone
Uh, how would this break NDA? I presume it's in the developer copy everyone has access to? Does the guy answering this have some credentials we don't know about?
The developer copy is theoretically for developers only... Hence the name. And therefore its covered by the NDA. It's so we don't all reveal the secret feature you're not meant to know about yet. You know the one...
How many people save bookmarks to their home screen?
Not just bookmarks. HTML5 web apps too.
We shouldn't be patting Apple on it's head and cheering them for fixing their own engineering mistakes.
How many people save bookmarks to their home screen?
m.youtube.com > Apple's native app. BY FARMacrumors has been on my home screen since I got the iPhone
To be fair, this means nothing since no one knows when you got your iphone.It could have been five minutes before posting that post.
:-/
The developer copy is theoretically for developers only... Hence the name. And therefore its covered by the NDA. It's so we don't all reveal the secret feature you're not meant to know about yet. You know the one...
And by developer you mean any joe blow willing to drop 100 bucks to download iOS 5 early. There's no way Apple would try and hunt down every last person who dropped the 100 and is leaking stuff that is basically public knowledge from using the developer build.