From the article: "I experienced minimal complications when using Safari on both the iPhone and iPad"
minimal complications is a euphemism for "Any normal user would throw the thing against the wall in frustration."
To me this is just further demonstration of the failure of HTML5 on mobile. It's been, what, 4 years we've been in the "HTML5 will save us all" hype bubble?
Don't get me wrong; I am building a webapp and aspects of HTML5 have made my life far easier than if I were still in 2008. If I had hair I'd still be pulling it out due to the complexities of CSS (even with things like LESS) and subtle browser differences would turn the rest of it gray. But the current state of HTML+CSS+JS on the desktop is pretty good; compared.
We appear to be years away from a similar state in mobile. Between Safari's problems with no JIT support within apps and the fragmentation of Android, coupled with the monstrosity known as IE on WP7 (and WP8 and Win8), it is just not possible to use "HTML5" to build a great mobile experience (and reach a large audience).
My history in working with the W3C (I worked on HTML 3.2 and 4), and my understanding of the asymetric competitive nature of the major players (Apple, Google, Microsoft) makes me believe this situation is not going to radically improve anytime soon.
The upside is dev tool vendors who can help ease the pain should do pretty well (e.g. things like Xamarin (C#) and MoSync (C/C++/JavaScript))...
Android fragmentation is a reason not to use HTML5? That's about as backwards a statement as I can imagine - web apps are the great savior that abstract away all the device fragmentation. And windows phone's incompatibility as a sticking point? That's an easy one to overcome: nobody writes windows phone apps either. I don't have any experience with mobile IEs quirks, but if it's as bad as you make it sound, just sniff the UA and tell the user it is not compatible. Until I see a windows phone show up in my server logs, I'm not going to worry about it.
Overall, web apps as a platform have made a lot more growth than native mobile apps have aince the advent of the smartphone. There's no reason to look at the state of html5 now and say "it'll never work". Sure, there are some things that native is better for, but html5 is a very useful tool and can give a great user experience in a lot of cases, and it's only going to get better.
Unfortunately, in practice, the fragmentation extends into browser incompatibilities. I have first-hand knowledge of this, to the extend that a broken WebKit from Android 2.2 had been forward ported to Android 2.3 on one of the mobile devices we tested.
Android is a good reason to not use HTML5, to be honest. It confuses me deeply that Apple has provided far more HTML5 webapp functionality that Google has- Google ought to be encouraging webapps whenever possible.
> web apps are the great savior that abstract away all the device fragmentation.
I'm not sure if you are trying to be serious or not with this. Do you really believe this is true today? That you can build a mobile experience using HTML that compares to that of a native app?
Certainly there are SOME cases where it makes sense. But for MOST apps, it simply does not. For example, let's say I wanted to build an app that used location and could run in the background. How, exactly, would I build a "web app" that worked across iPhone, iPad, and say 75% of Android devices?
And how is whatever you come up with "HTML5"?
WORA has always been, and always will be a pipe dream. HTML5 gets closer but, unfortunately, due to the dynamics of mobile the target is moving further away.
You can't build web apps that run in the background and expect any sort of browser compatibility, and you know it. That's why you picked that example, despite the fact that I freely admitted in my original comment that there are use cases for which a native app is a better choice. If you are bound and determined to hate the web, good for you.
Yep. My money is on Xamarin. There's a huge opportunity for somebody to make native app development less painful and they seem to be the only player with the experience and talent and tech to make this happen.
I agree, to a point. I primarily work on mobile html5 apps. You actually can make an experience that compares to native in some cases. For example, I created the App.net client http://shrtmsg.com which I believe is on par with the native apps. If you target "latest and greatest" browsers, the subtle browser differences thing isn't that big of a deal.
What I don't get is how people direct their disappointment with the state of html5 towards "html5" as though the idea was to blame, or the idea has failed.
If you want to know why html5 is slow to roll out on mobile it should be blatantly obvious: there is almost no competition. Whereas on desktop competition is fierce. On iOS competition is outright disallowed. On Android it is allowed, but it is harder to get people to switch than on desktop. So this is why we see the "once a year" browser updates on the 2 major platforms.
Have you actually used the html5 site? If not, why are you commenting on it? As far as html5 sites go on mobile, it works really damn well. The only issues I have with it are more a problem with the Grooveshark service as a whole (mis-named songs, incomplete albums).
> To me this is just further demonstration of the failure of HTML5 on mobile. It's been, what, 4 years we've been in the "HTML5 will save us all" hype bubble?
Everyone is moving away from HTML5 (Facebook, etc.). Grooveshark is only moving toward HTML5 because what they do is fundamentally illegal and the app stores have shut them out.
As that article states they couldn't or may have not wanted to pay the cost for streaming EMI's music. Heck there is a ton more money to be made when your not paying the content owners who without their content there would be no Grooveshark. THe masses would care less for it.
In 2012 I am surprised a court ruled in their favor as with Youtube it's focus wasn't just popular music, same goes for justin.tv. THough with Grooveshark their M.O. is access to popular music and now you can get all the music you want for free whenever you want through your mobile device.
I wonder how much longer it will last? Megaupload anyone? Well i'm going to cancel my Spotify subscription and use this instead!
I tried using Grooveshark's html5 web app the last few days.
I thought I might be able to cancel Spotify in which I use everytime I drive (few times a day). Using Grooveshark's web app in the car is NO REPLACEMENT for Spotify, as a playlist doesn't play contiguously and if it does there is a one to two minute delay between each track. Other times between tracks while driving I've had to fidget with the play/pause button to start tracks.
Spotify is the clear winner and I'm happy paying subscriber!
Great example of how innovation can occur when new challenges (artificial or physical) arise. Ironically, this is happening in the same industry that failed miserably at adapting to new challenges. Rock on, Grooveshark.
> the same industry that failed miserably at adapting to new challenges.
I didn't realize the "users sharing tracks they pirated" industry had had trouble with adapting to new challenges. If anything, they have the most experience adapting to new challenges.
Edit: Before someone says "not every single track on Grooveshark was pirated," think carefully about whether that's an intellectually honest argument to make.
I'm saying a huge amount of YouTube's content is infringing on somebody's copyright, still. Even after their Vevo, matching content to copyrighted content algorithms and all.
I was referring to the music industry in general, who did fail to adapt to the rise of the internet and focused on trying to stop pirating rather than create new avenues of consumption that appealed to the new generation of listeners. I think we can both agree on this point. I'm not really interested in arguing about the piracy industry as it opens up too many emotionally backed arguments that naturally disregard logic in favor of subjective terms.
> I'm not really interested in arguing about the piracy industry as it opens up too many emotionally backed arguments that naturally disregard logic in favor of subjective terms.
Right, it's just that that's the industry Grooveshark is in, not the music industry. They're trying to muscle into the music industry with their userbase. But they'd never exist if they hadn't assumed users would share tracks illegally en masse from the start.
I don't think I'll ever understand why companies expend a ton of energy developing a decent web app, yet neglect to turn on the apple-mobile-web-app-capable meta tag which makes the app run fullscreen when it's saved to the home screen...
According to http://openradar.appspot.com/8761419 apps that specify that tag cannot do background audio. I think that would be larger annoyance for users of Grooveshark.
Besides the audio thing, the home screen app feature only works for single-page web apps. Any page change goes into Safari (which is reasonable I guess).
This tag caused an issue on certain versions of Android for one of my mobile web apps. I'm able to consistently reproduce this on Android 2.3.3. When an input field is focused upon, and the on screen keyboard is initialized, focus on the input field is lost, causing input to not reach the input field. So just make sure it's only included on iOS devices.
Chrome for Android unfortunately has a major bug which makes HTML5 audio impractical. It stops the audio when you turn off the screen, change tabs, or change from the browser to another app.
It makes me weep a little for the web when browsers cripple HTML5 like this; there's enough intrinsic downsides of running apps inside a browser (e.g. no app store, no presence on homescreen, no background processing) without having to worry about things that should work but don't.
After what happened to MegaUpload and the lawsuits against Grooveshark, I'm a little afraid of making a username with Grooveshark. How private are they keeping that data in case the FBI or whoever storms their office? They should have a very tight policy for this to protect their users.
Unless you upload copyrighted music you don't have the rights to, you shouldn't be liable for anything even if the FBI or ICE does seize their servers.
Hmm, it crashed the browser on me (iPad 3, safari).
I went to the site, searched for a random band and picked a playlist (a large one ~500 songs if it helps). I went to the playlist view and started scrolling through the songs, relatively quickly. I noticed the "bar" at the bottom of the playlist view was flickering a lot, you could see the upcoming song rows through it when it flickered then 'bam' whole browser crashed. Relaunched safari, it still had the grooveshark tab open, almost instantly crashed again.
Thanks for the bug report! This particular problem is actually decently high in the bugtracker so I'd think we'd have something within the next few bugfix releases.
As another commentator replied, it's something that we have to deal with. I can't speak for sure, but I think what we're running in to here is too many elements on the page. I'm sure I'm glossing over the finer details, but I'd expect whatever bugfix is made will address that.
Suggestion: start on the Popular tab, not Search. There's already a dedicated search field, and when I got to the page the big empty search area made me think the page was broken. Starting on Popular also would give a one-click-to-experience factor.
Interesting that they optimize for playing of songs rather than albums. It would be nice to be able to queue up a whole album to listen to, rather than having to select the tracks one by one (in the correct order!) .. particularly frustrating since the one thing I wanted to listen to at the time was a mix (DJ /Rupture - minesweeper suite) - order matters!
The mobile app is a companion that assumes you're like me and have a large collection of playlists curated already from the desktop web app.
I do, so it works great for me.
Also, "playing" songs adds them to your run queue. you can also "play next" or "play last" to queue them appropriately.
In the search results, if you scroll past the song results, you'll see an album list. Tap the album list. "Play now" will queue the entire album in order.
They have the functionality, you're just not used to their terrible UX. (I'm a longtime paying Grooveshark and Spotify user, so I'm used to navigating this nonsense)
I'm not exactly sure why it assumes such primary use case though. There are many downsides to such a scenario: playlists are not searchable; their order is also fixed, which exacerbates the former problem when your playlists grow massive. From my understanding of the UI, the user's library is supposed to solve both issues, but it is not easily browsable on either iOS or Android (my unfortunate choices for consuming music). Perhaps, a workaround is to have "smart playlists" or optional tags for an album that you can come back to later.
It becomes a bit frustrating because basically the only way to listen to an album is to search for it. I'm mostly OK with that workaround, but the problem is that many albums have duplicates. I specifically select particular tracks I want in the library to make sure I can maintain consecutive playback of entire albums that do require it; a selection process which is rendered useless when re-doing the search from ground up on the go.
Is that true for the html5 app on iPhone? I can only see a list of songs, and add them to my queue.. No albums in sight. Tried with the aforementioned album, beatles - sgt peppers lonely hearts club band, "beatles" only..
Edit: looking at other comments it seems I may still be seeing the old version (still says beta at the top) here in Japan. Will try again later..
This is actually a limitation of the web interfaces for Rdio, MOG, Grooveshark, and I'm assuming google and amazon's cloud player as well.
EDIT: Just found this http://getfactotum.com. But it'd still be better if there was some HTML5 support for it since the app only works on specific sites.
Yes, I've implemented this kind of thing with http://player.fm and it's really a fundamental limitation of the HTML5 audio tag.
iOS is actually very cool in this department as it treats HTML5 audio as a native audio track, so it works with bluetooth controls, the play icon shows up in toolbar, works in the background, etc. Everything native audio does.
The reason next/prev doesn't work is because HTML5 audio has no concept of a playlist. It's just a dumb audio tag with exactly one source URL to play. So iOS really has no way to map what's going on in the browser into the usual concept of a playlist and it has no API to call to move to the next or previous track.
It's still well ahead of the other mobile OSs though, in the way it does at least treat HTML5 audio as standard audio, to the extent that's possible.
Too bad they are kicked out of Google Play, so can't wrap the HTML5 in an app via PhoneGap, or publish a launcher app that just goes to the site inside a web view. They are missing the huge amount of traffic that comes from the app store by just being another web site like this.
This is really cool, i can now use this at the gym instead of Pandora! It looks like there is still more functionality to be added but that will come with time. I like that it plays in the background while i am using my other apps as well.
Does it matter? The artist and label legally agreed to a contact between the two parties. Sure you don't like it and think that the label is making more money than you think it should, but the artist legally allowed that price difference to happen.
So, Grooveshark keeps getting sued by all four major record labels, their native apps are banned from both the iOS and Android app stores, and we're sitting here talking about HTML5. Probably the worst case study ever for mobile strategy.
This isn't news. I've been using the beta for at least a month now. The player is great, but the rest of the UI is severely limited. No logging in is supported, so you're stuck searching for every song you want to hear.
Maybe it's not available everywhere yet, I can't log in either, actually I can still see the "grooveshark beta" header. Am I the only one who sees this?
Try clearing your cache/cookies. Going to grooveshark.com directly on your mobile device should just work. Otherwise, you may want to try html5.grooveshark.com
You may want to consider clearing your cache and cookies and reloading grooveshark.com on your device. The main features of this release are large screen (tablet) support and the ability to login to access your collection.
Press doesn't seem to have mentioned, this is a US-only launch for now, for business reasons. It will be coming to the rest of the world in a month or so, I believe.
Do you have any source for that? I'm in Israel and I seem to be getting the old beta on almost all platforms, but from time to time I do get the new one.
Source is my boss telling me to make it that way. ;) Curious how you're getting the new one on occasion...that should be very consistent, unless some of your requests randomly come from a different IP, and our geoip DB thinks it's US?
Well, I'd be very happy to hear when your boss tell you that it's going to change - I'd love to get it here!
I don't believe there's any reason my IP would be identified differently, but I can tell that except for once on the first day this never happened again from any device here.
I love the html5 version of grooveshark though it's limited I can still use it on my iphone. I really wish there was a directory which showed all html5 apps kind of app store style. Does anyone know if there are any?
Oh what's this video front and center in the middle of the page?
Flash. I click on the link to the website that's gone full HTML5 on all devices and am staring Flash in the face.
I feel like I've been had. Much more so for the Flash video than the nit on semantic tags.
Edit:
Ah ha! By rolled out they meant sequestered away at http://html5.grooveshark.com, not http://grooveshark.com. They should really be linking to the HTML5 version of the site from the article. It's also the page I get when I use my phone to access the site.
There we have an audio tag, though <div id="page-header" ...> exists instead of a header tag.
Ah well, these are super minor nits at the end of the day. I'm glad for any site that is trying to get away from app stores and go native. I still feel like the term "full HTML5" is a tad vague (and not yet true).
Do you even know what HTML5 is? HTML5 doesn't enforce the use of header, section, article and all of the other tags. The tags you mention are merely for semantically marking up content and are block level elements like DIV's. The fact that Grooveshark is using things like HTML5 audio and whatnot without the reliance on 3rd party plugins like Flash to me is what HTML5 is all about.
I take "full HTML 5" to mean that it doesn't use any technologies outside of the HTML 5 umbrella (which includes CSS, JavaScript, etc.), like Flash, not that it necessarily uses every HTML 5 feature to its full potential.
Sorry, I'm really just upset that Flash is still being used on their main page (the page that the article links to). I had to go to html5.grooveshark.com to get a version without Flash.
I guess its silly of me to not take "all devices" as "all mobile devices", which is reasonable in the context of site vs appstore
I'm going to guess that you were using your computer at the time. If you're using a desktop browser you're going to be directed to the site which relies on flash.
If you're in a Webkit browser you can use html5.grooveshark.com and get the html5 experience on your desktop.
On a handheld device, we automatically direct you to the html5 site when you visit grooveshark.com
You didn't answer the question. The question being asked is why - if y'all are capable of delivering an html5 grooveshark for mobile - the main grooveshark app (your flagship product) still exclusively uses flash.
That's a perfectly fair argument. For those who want to embrace HTML5, which flash-based features in the main site weren't ready to be ported to HTML5 due to technical limitations? As one of the few sites even trying, your use case could drive HTML5 audio.
The main site actually used to be 100% Flash (Flex). We've ported nearly everything out now but there are some algorithms that are still in there for no other reason than never getting around to porting them, but the other thing we rely pretty heavily on Flash for is cross domain communication with 3rd party services, many of them don't support or know about CORS/jsonp but getting them to add a crossdomain.xml on their site was easy. We'll probably just disable support for those services for people who don't have Flash. We'll also probably prefer to use flash whenever it is available for playback, because so far for the most part HTML5 audio is still more flaky and gives us less control over buffering/playback than Flash does...but at least the basic aspects of the site that most people care about will be able to work seamlessly whether or not you have flash. Eventually. :)
+1! Thank you for the thought out response! Seriously - your company should share it more broadly. You have a rare perspective on HTML5's audio story. Most folks have only focused on video.
I'm curious where 3rd party services come in in slightly more detail - I'd always assumed what I saw on grooveshark was a 100% client-server app. I'm assuming they're something like pulling from an album art service or a similarly ornamental interface that wasn't even worth carrying over to the mobile experience.
What's "flaky" mean? Do you mean that using it sometimes resulted in failure to deliver audio to a user with a compatible user-agent? If so, that sucks. Which browsers, any ideas what's wrong with it? If not - could you clarify?
I may strongly disagree with Grooveshark as a company, but that doesn't mean you aren't one of the only legitimate players with experience in delivering audio on the web. I am curious to hear more.
>It's also the page I get when I use my phone to access the site.
That's how it's supposed to be. When you go to grooveshark.com on your phone you get the html5 app, from anywhere else you get the main (flash using) site. Using html5.grooveshark.com takes you to the html5 site no matter what.
It's not the same. When you consume music for free, you're consuming a product without paying the person that put the largest amount of work into it. Laws aside, where's the ethics in that?
In the music business there is certainly a fairness issue of middlemen taking a large cut, but Grooveshark is not solving that.
are you comparing laws and copyright infringement?
Grooveshark takes content created by someone else and then profits from the distribution of that content without permission and without passing back any revenue to the rightful owner of the content. How does that compare to uber?
copyright infringement is also 'law'... so I'm comparing laws with laws.
I'm not comparing the individual actions of the companies. Only that sometimes "the law" is not useful anymore.
Which yes, I am saying that copyright needs to change, the notion of a 'rightful owner of content' needs to change. Having laws that are completely contrary to how society operates are generally doomed to fail.
I'm not sure where this type of opinion came from but it definitely has been becoming more prevalent in the last 5 years. I think it is just people are becoming more inclined to think they are entitled to someones else's creative content just because it has been easy to acquire free for years now.
Just because it is easy to copy music online doesn't mean all music should be 'free' and every artist should just abandon what many of them rely on to make a living just because you want to save some money on your entertainment.
I will point out that copyright is extended to creatives by the general population as a mutually beneficial agreement to foster the development of creative works to be shared with said population. In the past five years, and to some extent before that, certain groups have started to abuse that relationship. I should come as no surprise that the attitudes towards the arrangement are starting to change. When the mutually beneficial part starts to erode, something is bound to give.
I'm not sure how the last handful of years of copyright law changes have done anything so dramatic to cause this. Copyright was extended an extra 20 years, that doesn't change the fact that the most popular content, ie the new stuff out right now, should still be paid for at the artists asking price.
It should be up to the musician to reject the culture of monetization and distribute their music for free, not you. Musicians shouldn't have to work another job so they can have the privilege of supplying you with music. If you value their music, you should demonstrate it to them, so they make more for you.
If no one wants to buy (the right to listen to) a song then it 's price is too high.
Given a lot of arts are heavily inspired by the culture around them, who gives the artist the 'right' to own all 'rights' to music they create
Poetry is an art that doesn't make money (compared to music), has poetry died? Just because we monetized something doesn't mean it was the right thing to do.
> If no one wants to buy (the right to listen to) a song then it 's price is too high.
Wait. The music industry made some 2 digit billions of dollars last year. No one wants to pay for music entertainment?
> Given a lot of arts are heavily inspired by the culture around them, who gives the artist the 'right' to own all 'rights' to music they create
Substitute your profession above for artists. Do you feel the same? Everyone is inspired from things which came before them, and yes you can profit off of your new creation which has been influenced from culture which has come before you.
> Poetry is an art that doesn't make money (compared to music), has poetry died?
Top 3: Shakespeare, Beowulf, The Odyssey. The publishing companies who printed these books and spent the time typesetting, translating them etc aren't making money?
> Just because we monetized something doesn't mean it was the right thing to do.
This argument only seems to come up in context to books/music/movies. IE: Entertainment which you can easily get for free and think people should be compensated zero dollars for it now because of the internet. Ridiculous. Why are the people who create entertainment the only ones who should work for charity? Note: it isn't some noble cause, it is because you don't rely on that industry to put food on the table, are cheap, and can get your entertainment online for free instead.
> Wait. The music industry made some 2 digit billions of dollars last year. No one wants to pay for music entertainment?
I posed it as a question, if people are not prepared to pay for something (e.g they download it for free), it because it is priced wrong (too high). That doesn't mean all music is priced too high.
> Substitute your profession above for artists. Do you feel the same? Everyone is inspired from things which came before them, and yes you can profit off of your new creation which has been influenced from culture which has come before you.
You can't substitute any profession over the top. Arts are intrinsically different, their value is much harder to calculate. This has long been discussed throughout history, it is only in very recent history that some of the arts have become a 'profession'.
> Top 3: Shakespeare, Beowulf, The Odyssey. The publishing companies who printed these books and spent the time typesetting, translating them etc aren't making money?
Right...not the artist.. That is a strange argument to make. In all those cases, the artist is long died, and someone (else) is trying to make a buck off of their work... Copyright is only meant to last the life time of the author + 50(?) years... So Shakespeare and Homer are really bad examples in a copyright debate.
> This argument only seems to come up in context to books/music/movies.
This argument comes up every time there is a major shift in how people act/produce. The same 'debate' occurred when the printing press destroyed monopolies on books... Who's response was: Copyright.
> it isn't some noble cause, it is because you don't rely on that industry to put food on the table, are cheap, and can get your entertainment online for free instead.
Nice ad hominem. Though try to keep that out of the discussion please.
This is more like talking past each-other than a real discussion, since you're not making any solid arguments addressing the points you're responding to. People downloading music can be an indication of opportunism as much as of market failure.
Think about how much smaller the music industry would be, and I'm just talking about the number of people making music themselves, if there were no sales of recordings. No more buying a CD on your way out of a local or touring band's show, no more iTunes Music Store or Amazon MP3 or CD store, no more labels; you're talking about taking away a majority of these artists' revenue. If musicians can't ever hope to get paid enough to put food on their table and a roof over their head, how many will put in the energy needed to bring their music to fruition? How many will put in the effort to make good recordings for you to enjoy? Making a good recording is difficult and expensive, and we benefit greatly from it. There is value there for us that we should have the courtesy of recognizing if we hope to enjoy a wide selection good music recordings in the future.
minimal complications is a euphemism for "Any normal user would throw the thing against the wall in frustration."
To me this is just further demonstration of the failure of HTML5 on mobile. It's been, what, 4 years we've been in the "HTML5 will save us all" hype bubble?
Don't get me wrong; I am building a webapp and aspects of HTML5 have made my life far easier than if I were still in 2008. If I had hair I'd still be pulling it out due to the complexities of CSS (even with things like LESS) and subtle browser differences would turn the rest of it gray. But the current state of HTML+CSS+JS on the desktop is pretty good; compared.
We appear to be years away from a similar state in mobile. Between Safari's problems with no JIT support within apps and the fragmentation of Android, coupled with the monstrosity known as IE on WP7 (and WP8 and Win8), it is just not possible to use "HTML5" to build a great mobile experience (and reach a large audience).
My history in working with the W3C (I worked on HTML 3.2 and 4), and my understanding of the asymetric competitive nature of the major players (Apple, Google, Microsoft) makes me believe this situation is not going to radically improve anytime soon.
The upside is dev tool vendors who can help ease the pain should do pretty well (e.g. things like Xamarin (C#) and MoSync (C/C++/JavaScript))...