Ina Fried

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The iPhone and iPad Tops for HTML5, With Google’s Galaxy Nexus a Distant Second

While many people talk about HTML5 as a potential long-term threat to Apple’s mobile dominance, it turns out that, these days, iOS does the best job of rendering the Web standards.

A study by Spaceport.io found that Apple’s phones and tablets perform up to three times better than Android devices at various benchmarks. Performance on Android devices varied widely, with the Galaxy Nexus far outpacing phones running earlier versions of Google’s operating system.

The Spaceport study focused on the two biggest mobile operating systems, as opposed to those from RIM, Microsoft and others.

The collection of Web standards — HTML5 is actually a bunch of different Web technologies — boasts the promise that developers might one day be able to write applications once and have them smoothly run on multiple mobile operating systems.

The most recent versions of iOS and Android offer vast improvements in HTML5 rendering, though game makers and others still see a need for native apps.

“HTML5 is getting faster over time, as seen in the latest OS updates across Android and iOS,” said Spaceport.io founder Ben Savage. “Although this is a welcome trend, there is still a long way to go.”

All kinds of companies big and small are counting on HTML5 as their mobile platform of the future including, perhaps most notably, Facebook.

Mozilla has announced plans for an HTML5 app store, while Facebook last week called for industry cooperation on various HTML performance standards.

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Just as the atom bomb was the weapon that was supposed to render war obsolete, the Internet seems like capitalism’s ultimate feat of self-destructive genius, an economic doomsday device rendering it impossible for anyone to ever make a profit off anything again. It’s especially hopeless for those whose work is easily digitized and accessed free of charge.

— Author Tim Kreider on not getting paid for one’s work