Originally Posted By: Dignan
Originally Posted By: drakino
Out of curiosity, how well does google reader work in desktop mode in the Nexus One?

Not at all, sir! smile However, the Nexus One doesn't have "the best browsing experience of all time." Plus, it's a cell phone, and I'd want more screen area to view the stories in.

Do they actually block it, or does something else fail? I was mostly asking since the Nexus One is pretty comparable to the iPad as far as processing power.

Logging into Google Reader then scrolling the extended story area in a similar way to the iPad was resulting in spikes all the way up to 80% CPU when using Firefox on my Mac. Memory usage also went from 50MB at open to 200MB after scrolling back 10 hours worth of stories. So yeah, it's just not an application optimized for a tablet or phone browser.

iPhone OS 4.0 may bring some improvements to the iPad in terms of javascript performance, but it's hard to say how much. Odds are Google is going to need to tune things on their side if the "Desktop" variant of Reader is going to be the preferred one on the iPad.

Originally Posted By: Dignan
So in the end, I don't really blame the iPad, but I would still say that it's another case where I'm not getting the full web browsing experience, and it's on my second-most used site (after GMail).

Well, there is a difference here. Normal sites that display text and images via pretty standard HTML work fine, as the power needed to render/display them is pretty minimal. Web apps like Google Reader are quite a bit different, running (doing a quick check) ~700k worth of scripts and an additional ~250k worth of style sheet info. Thats the downside to Web apps compared to native apps. The device is now forced to both compile and execute code, instead of just having to worry about execution. Time will sort this issue out though, either with more powerful processors or better optimizations in the javascript compiler.

As for your paranoia, I can somewhat understand if you have so much info tied to that one account. My issues with using Google heavily are more concerns with having all my data out there somewhere, uncontrollable by me both in terms of what is done with it, and also how I access it. As I've voiced elsewhere, the downside to Web apps is losing control of when upgrades happen. I am forced into their new version, complete with new UI tweaks and all, instead of being able to upgrade and learn the new features when I want to.