Apple has long offered a way to bookmark our favourite websites to the home page of your iOS device, giving websites the same level of prominence afforded to native apps. This increased visibility now comes at a steep price, however: websites launched via home page links don't get to use Safari's new Nitro engine, which means they run two to three times slower than websites launched directly from within Safari.
Developer and author Maximiliano Firtman has run a series of tests to confirm this behaviour, and is now "99.9999% sure" of the cause. The obvious question to ask is why this would happen; is it a very confusing bug, or was it a conscious decision by Apple to deprecate websites, making native applications look better? Every time Apple slams Adobe for their 'closed' Flash player, they do it by trumpeting that they're in favour of the 'open' web. If this speed disparity is a feature, rather than a bug, it would fly in the face of the company's stance. It would, in fact, be a beautiful gift to Apple's competitors in the mobile space.
Apple has yet to issue a public statement about this issue, though they are, apparently, aware of it, and Firtman claims to have been told by the Mobile Safari team that they have no intention of fixing it.
Via The Register
