HTML5 Boilerplate vs Google's Web Starter Kit

These configuration files may help increase performance of the webapp.

Modernizr checks browser support for HTML5, CSS3, as well as a few other miscellaneous elements and allows for easily writing fallbacks if they're not supported.

To help out newcommers to either programming in general or HTML5 Boilerplate specifically, the boilerplate includes in-depth docs that help understand how things work and why certain choices are made. The documentation is highly comprehensive going even as far as to describe every single line of normalize.css that the H5BP includes.

H5BP includes normalize.css that will help fix inconsistencies in the way browsers render elements.

HTML5 Boilerplate theme doesn't only provide a base template for building your next modern site. It also has performance optimization features built into it which include stuff like html + js minification , image size reduction as well as css minification. This link here describes how to optimize your shiny new html5 site using these built in features.

With optional support for XHR, we can use techniques such as XHR eval and XHR injections to optimize the loading of external scripts and significantly reduce page load times. Alongside XHR, built-in support for Flash means that you can use your old swf/flash content on your website, where you feel you're not ready for HTML5 yet.

Since a lot of web designers these days don't use the plain old CSS, instead they use a CSS pre-processor (like Sass or Less). Thanks to Sass support web designers can easily add GWK to their workflows.

Starter Kit includes Autoprefixer that takes care of vendor prefixes.

Since the base skeleton provided by the Web Starter kit is authored by Google itself, it's pretty much understood that the template is optimized to the max, for performance. If you test a site (on Google PageSpeed Insights) built by the GWK you can be sure that it'll always achieve a very high score.

Since most of the websites that are currently being built (or any website that was built after 2012) are responsive, a 'scaffold-ed' website skeleton without any responsiveness would be pretty useless.

Helps to build website faster by refreshing the page automatically as you save the source file changes.

Gulp script includes tools for image optimization, JavaScript & CSS minification & optimization and HTML minification.

In case you want to try out your shiny new site on your mobile phone or another PC. Just type in the command gulp serve and load up the provided server address from another device to see how your website looks and performs.

If you use the Gulp build system and are familiar with its environment, you can directly use Web Starter Kit's Gulp build script to build your next GWK based project.

BrowserSync offers a browser live-update solution across multiple devices. And it works with basically every desktop and mobile browser. Even IE7.

There's a Yeoman generator for Google's Web Starter Kit available. To install (requires Node, Ruby, Gulp, and Sass):

sudo npm install -g yo generator-web-starter-kit
cd project-root-directory/
yo web-starter-kit
npm install
gulp serve