For web developers who care about mobile...
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I found this[^] interesting, and surprising. Android devices have screamed past the iPhone in market share (for multiple reasons), yet for mobile browsing Safari has just increased its dominant lead. I'm curious, for those who do website design, how much of a pain is it to worry about the different mobile browsers? Is it a huge pain to run well on all the mobile platforms, do you even do mobile versions of your site? Or are mobile devices powerful enough now that you just let the desktop version be pinched and zoomed to death? I don't do website design, nor do I really want to, but it is occasionally related to my work.
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I found this[^] interesting, and surprising. Android devices have screamed past the iPhone in market share (for multiple reasons), yet for mobile browsing Safari has just increased its dominant lead. I'm curious, for those who do website design, how much of a pain is it to worry about the different mobile browsers? Is it a huge pain to run well on all the mobile platforms, do you even do mobile versions of your site? Or are mobile devices powerful enough now that you just let the desktop version be pinched and zoomed to death? I don't do website design, nor do I really want to, but it is occasionally related to my work.
One thing that has been pointed out in other places is a lot of the mobile browsers for Android show up as desktop agents or Safari. I just checked whatbrowser.org on my htc EVO using Dolphin and it showed up as Safari 4. Then again using the default browser and it came up again, with Safari 4. So the graph is a bit misleading. I'm not sure about other android browsers, but Dolphin seems to reformat the page to display relevant text together so I dont have to scroll left and right. This might be a feature of the OS, haven't delved that deeply into that part of it. My biggest complaints are sites that are overly loaded with Flash that take more than a few seconds to load on a solid data connection. I want to click the link, I want the info now and not 30 seconds from now. Which is why I have Flash turned off until I activate each item myself on a page by page basis.
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One thing that has been pointed out in other places is a lot of the mobile browsers for Android show up as desktop agents or Safari. I just checked whatbrowser.org on my htc EVO using Dolphin and it showed up as Safari 4. Then again using the default browser and it came up again, with Safari 4. So the graph is a bit misleading. I'm not sure about other android browsers, but Dolphin seems to reformat the page to display relevant text together so I dont have to scroll left and right. This might be a feature of the OS, haven't delved that deeply into that part of it. My biggest complaints are sites that are overly loaded with Flash that take more than a few seconds to load on a solid data connection. I want to click the link, I want the info now and not 30 seconds from now. Which is why I have Flash turned off until I activate each item myself on a page by page basis.
RJOberg wrote:
One thing that has been pointed out in other places is a lot of the mobile browsers for Android show up as desktop agents or Safari.
Well that would explain that graph then... and yeah, makes it kind of pointless as a gauge of anything.
RJOberg wrote:
My biggest complaints are sites that are overly loaded with Flash that take more than a few seconds to load on a solid data connection. I want to click the link, I want the info now and not 30 seconds from now. Which is why I have Flash turned off until I activate each item myself on a page by page basis.
I've held a general disdain for Flash ever since someone got the bright idea to use it as a tool for intrusive, loud ads that can't be avoided. I used to need to have it enabled to even use the web; these days though, not so much, which is at least partially due to Steve Jobs' personal vendetta against Adobe. However childish that might have been, I don't miss hearing my old laptop's fans spin up just because I stumbled onto a site that used Flash.
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I found this[^] interesting, and surprising. Android devices have screamed past the iPhone in market share (for multiple reasons), yet for mobile browsing Safari has just increased its dominant lead. I'm curious, for those who do website design, how much of a pain is it to worry about the different mobile browsers? Is it a huge pain to run well on all the mobile platforms, do you even do mobile versions of your site? Or are mobile devices powerful enough now that you just let the desktop version be pinched and zoomed to death? I don't do website design, nor do I really want to, but it is occasionally related to my work.
It really isn't hard to make a site mobile friendly from the beginning but converting an original site to work on mobiles can be a massive pain especially if you are using fixed widths. But if you take it into account in the original design then it isn't too hard, it just means you have to work out a way to convert your desktop site into something that fits into a mobile screen, I just normally merge all columns into one and just have them all stacked as rows and remove some useless images as well.
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I found this[^] interesting, and surprising. Android devices have screamed past the iPhone in market share (for multiple reasons), yet for mobile browsing Safari has just increased its dominant lead. I'm curious, for those who do website design, how much of a pain is it to worry about the different mobile browsers? Is it a huge pain to run well on all the mobile platforms, do you even do mobile versions of your site? Or are mobile devices powerful enough now that you just let the desktop version be pinched and zoomed to death? I don't do website design, nor do I really want to, but it is occasionally related to my work.
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I found this[^] interesting, and surprising. Android devices have screamed past the iPhone in market share (for multiple reasons), yet for mobile browsing Safari has just increased its dominant lead. I'm curious, for those who do website design, how much of a pain is it to worry about the different mobile browsers? Is it a huge pain to run well on all the mobile platforms, do you even do mobile versions of your site? Or are mobile devices powerful enough now that you just let the desktop version be pinched and zoomed to death? I don't do website design, nor do I really want to, but it is occasionally related to my work.
We use a customised web server that uses a Wurfl database to detect device type and serve highly specific versions, even serving variations in JS to support the variations/bugs in different platforms. Our usage is all private LAN, so we also restrict "support" to only certain devices, not the 10,000+ variations in the wild. High maint, but we have some very specific requirements and need complete control. Differences in browsers are plain painful, geez we have an example of two android phones in test, same versions, that behave different to each other!
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I found this[^] interesting, and surprising. Android devices have screamed past the iPhone in market share (for multiple reasons), yet for mobile browsing Safari has just increased its dominant lead. I'm curious, for those who do website design, how much of a pain is it to worry about the different mobile browsers? Is it a huge pain to run well on all the mobile platforms, do you even do mobile versions of your site? Or are mobile devices powerful enough now that you just let the desktop version be pinched and zoomed to death? I don't do website design, nor do I really want to, but it is occasionally related to my work.
if you accept that most browsers use some css3 you can add more than the media type in media declarations like media="only screen and (min-width: 480px)" with this you can have a selection of style sheets for different screen sizes, allowing it to render right on most screen sizes without needing to redirect