And then Sencha remade it and it managed to be faster than the native app. Also note that the actual mobile Facebook site remains as fast as the native app and was always faster than the "native" app that just used webtech. So, ironically, the webapp still wins when used and developed properly for a Facebook type app.

Native apps should always be faster except in the case where the native app isn't architected properly or web services are poorly implemented. Unfortunately, I've seen that both are often the case.

For CRUD apps like Facebook, it's often easier to do them right as web apps, but a good native app developer with a good backend team should almost always be able to beat them.

In that case it's incredibly disappointing that Twitter or Facebook's mobile apps continue to be every bit as fast as their native apps. I KNOW that you are right, as I've said, I'm well aware and worried of the overhead of doing things like video decoding in the browser... but for literally a few http requests, infinite scrolling and TEXT... (which is Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Path, etc, etc, etc)... Chrome for Android is simply going to be as fast as the native app.