How to make the mobile web better (for everyone)
Jan 08
I recently got an iPhone, while most of my time has been spent playing arround with it, I did try several things with it (hurray for the webkit css properties!).
It’s not made to visit websites
Regular website that is. While the iPhone UI designers made a good job at making the browsing as painless as it can be…it still is, a lot! It got me thinking what should be a mobile website for the end user. While the next gen “smartphones” (I hate that term) are all able to handle standard HTML to a certain extent, it doesn’t mean you should consider any website mobile friendly. When we sell a website to a client we need to start thinking about the mobile version as completely different website. The experience is not the same, the design shouldn’t be the same (who want’s a 500 pixel foot tall footer on an iPhone…) and most of all, the content shouldn’t be the same. This brings me to my second point.
Don’t try to revolutionize standards.
Mobile Safari did it right
- It cut the development time down, no need to learn a new languages.
- It’ll evolve at the same rate the normal browser evolve, following standards.
- You’re sure you website will work on every standard phones.
We don’t need a mobile browser war
We already spend countless hours debugging for non-standard browsers. If we are to develop a mobile version, we don’t want to go trought the pain of debugging on all the platforms possible there too.
#1 Jan 08 at 18:42
So true…
check this article Mobilize, don`t miniaturize.
*link removed*
#2 Jan 14 at 10:59
I agree on the last point…. “We don’t need a browser war”
#3 Jan 15 at 16:59
I strongly agree with that last point. The Browser wars left us with IE6. I don’t even want to imagine what a mobile browser war would leave us with.
#4 Jan 15 at 17:27
I agree that we as designers and developers do not need another browser war, but unfortunately I think it is inevitable. IMO, this coming year is going to be the biggest to date for mobile devices of all kinds, and they are all going to display websites differently.
This would mean more browser or perhaps device sniffing to make sure you know what type of media you are working with and loading the appropriate content. Hopefully, mobile devices will become more web standards compliant in the near future.
I personally fail to foresee a time when we will not have to run checks for devices. I suppose it is along the same lines as data types. Any good programmer wants to know what type of data he/she is dealing with. So any web developer/designer should also know what type of media they are dealing with.
#5 Jan 17 at 12:26
It’s strange you say Safari and not Opera mini or Mobile. Because the nr.1 problem with Safari-mobile is that (for now) it only runs on … Apple devices and as far as I know there are no plans to extend safari support to other devices.
Unlike Opera that even runs on iPhone but isn’t allowed by Apple. So if there will be a browser war you can blame Apple.
#6 Jan 19 at 16:49
@Scott Radcliff: I never saw browser testing the same as data type testing. I really do like the idea. Will help me ease the pain
@Stijn D: I’m talking about Safari because it’s the only one I extensively tested. While I do refer to mostly Safari in that post I don’t see Opera/Firefox being an obstacle to standard on mobile devices.
As for Apple weird policies, I can’t agree more. They did however allow some browsers to be published on the app store (http://www.theiphoneblog.com/2009/01/13/apple-app-store-approves-3rd-party-iphone-webbrowsers/). Opera is not there, is it because it’s a strong Safari competitor? Surely.
#7 Jan 29 at 05:56
[...] S. Caron points out that it is important that mobile browsers speak the same css as desktop browsers. More importantly, it cannot be underestimated the importance of minimizing variables with new technologies. There is so much for us to stomache about the mobile web and about cloud computing, let us at least have one constant. [...]
#8 Feb 16 at 07:55
[...] Kaynak: No margin for errors [...]