With more and more people embracing the idea of producing HTML5 mobile web apps, research like this is becoming vital. There are a lot of gotchas in this article, especially if you’ve been ignoring this space.
You should read the whole article, but I just want to point out a pair of findings before I send you on your way. One has been a known issue for a while (it’s a ySlow rule, after all,) but it’s still worth pointing out. The other… wow… my emphasis.
Results varied wildly across the three most recent versions of iOS. Astonishingly, Mobile Safari on iOS 3.1.3 did not cache components of any size, despite having an apparently unlimited page cache size. This is troubling since it means iOS 3.1.3 users are likely getting a suboptimal browsing experience, especially if they aren’t using wifi. The unlimited page cache size does little good here, since it only comes into play for back/forward navigations. This behavior is a significant change from what others observed in previous iOS releases and I can’t imagine any good reason for it, so I suspect this may be a bug.
Mobile Safari on iOS 3.2 (which is only available on the iPad) does not exhibit this bug. Its 25.6KB component limit and ~281.6KB total cache limit are better than nothing, but they still seem paltry compared to the other devices tested. Uniquely among iOS devices, the iPad appears to limit the size of pages in the page cache to 25.6KB, the same as its component size limit.
Read the rest of the article:
