60fps on the mobile web — Flipboard Engineering.

Flipboard launched during the dawn of the smartphone and tablet as a mobile-first experience, allowing us to rethink content layout principles from the web for a more elegant user experience on a variety of touchscreen form factors.

Now we’re coming full circle and bringing Flipboard to the web. Much of what we do at Flipboard has value independent of what device it’s consumed on: curating the best stories from all the topics, sources, and people that you care about most. Bringing our service to the web was always a logical extension.

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Most modern mobile devices have hardware-accelerated canvas, so why couldn’t we take advantage of this? HTML5 games certainly do. But could we really develop an application user interface in canvas?

Using <canvas> for everything seems like a bad idea. It means you drop any painting or CSS optimizations, sacrifice any searchability (e.g., Google’s spiders), and accessibility (e.g., screen readers). It essentially means writing your own display engine, just to get some very particular display behavior. I get it, but all the code they wrote will probably be obsolete in just a few years.