The Sad State of the Mobile Web

snydeq writes "Despite being the much better development platform for today's smartphones, open Web standards still face an uphill battle on mobile devices, Fatal Exception's Neil McAllister writes, noting that here, as on the desktop, the main hurdle is scalability. But whereas successful Web development for the desktop is a matter of scaling up, mobile Web development calls for applications that can effectively scale down as well — an imperative that is fast making the state of the mobile Web 'even sadder,' McAllister writes. 'The more that modern Web applications take advantage of the new client-side technologies available in desktop browsers, the more the divide between the desktop Web and the mobile Web widens.' As a result, developers are forced to fall back on basic Web technologies — a tactic that too often translates simply into writing separate UIs for mobile users. 'The result? Mobile Web applications are in pretty much the same boat as they were when the first WAP-enabled handsets appeared: two separate development tracks, one for the desktop and one for mobile.'"

Comments

Outdated?

[tpwch]

Is this really true anymore? With devices like the Nokia N900 being released, that has full-featured browsers that can handle everything a desktop browsers can, I doubt this will be an issue much longer.

Re:Outdated?

[Anonymous Coward]

The problem with Mobile Web generally though is that some people have inappropriate sites for pretty much any browser but which have been hacked together to just about make it through on desktops but as a result require loads of power behind them. These sort of sites just make mobile devices fall down. Slashdot is prime example - have you ever tried to come on here on an ipod touch or other mobile device? Hell, it doesn't even work on the Wii, which is a bit more than a standard mobile browser...

Re:Outdated?

[Jellybob]

Modern smartphones can handle just about anything you throw at them. The UI is the problem, since what works on a 22" widescreen monitor, with a keyboard and mouse, doesn't work on a 9" touchscreen.

We're not going to see alternative mobile UIs going away any time soon, and that in my opinion is a good thing. The desktop version will work if you really want all the features that it comes with, but it's not going to be the optimal way of using things.

Native mobile applications are also a big factor here, and are often a far better choice so long as you have the man power (or money) to produce them, since they give you a far more targetted UI, which can integrate with a phone's hardware features to provide something even smoother.

Re:Outdated?

[mcgrew]

Is this really true anymore?

Yes. I have a Motorola i776, and with many sites it complains about not having enough memory. That includes slashdot. I won't work with wikipedia at all. The phone's browser controls are horrible too, for instance there's no slash and no back button. I only bough the thing (cost $100) a few months ago.

Re:Outdated?

[bemymonkey]

The N900 hasn't even been released yet, and it's already outdated (not that that's going to stop me from buying one...). It's one of the first smartphones to play in-browser Flash video halfway decently, but what about when Youtube switches to H264 only... what about when the next technology after AJAX/CSS/Javascript comes out?

Sure, the browsers on new smartphones are great, but they're still a long way away from being able to display pages the same way as a desktop or laptop... mostly because of CPU constraints, as far as I can tell.

Re:Outdated?

[Tyr_7BE]

I really don't understand this. Just about every iPhone user on the web loves to shout to the heavens about how fantastic the browser is. What makes it so great? Technically it's the most capable browser on a mobile device, but not by very much. Take a look at this http://www.quirksmode.org/webkit.html . Iris browser and Bolt browser both fare very well, but nobody ever talks about them like they do with Safari. I tried Opera Mini 5 the other day and I was extremely impressed. It basically gave me web pages like my desktop does. Still, it gets no love. I have one of the newest blackberries, and its browser gets me by just fine. I make it tell web pages that it's a firefox browser, and I get full versions of pages like I would at a PC. I use it at least a half a dozen times a day, and have no real complaints about it (except maybe the lack of tabbed browsing but that's not a big deal for me). Yet every iPhone user loves to get smug about how they have Safari. Every time I've asked someone for clarification, they either ignore me or they say something to the effect of "oh you wouldn't understand, you don't use an iPhone". So I figure I'll try my luck and ask again.

What makes the iPhone's browser that noteworthy? Is it that great in other ways? Or is this just the users being vocal again?

Re:I have a better idea

[JordanL]

Look at all the OpenSource solutions to rapid web development.

• Concrete
• Joomla
• SilverStripe
• Etc.

None of those programs even have a core that's close to being mobile enabled, and no one using them is going to create one. I think the largest problem is simply that the tools most people use for their websites are too bloated, complicated and poorly written to create an effective mobile web.

For example, I have a client that I just last week had to broach the subject of a mobile enabled version of their Joomla 1.5 site with. They were adamant that a version that cellphones could use was absolutely important, but because of the HUGE framework Joomla uses, and the relatively small number of functions a mobile version would need to perform, I basically opted to build a very tiny CMS that would mirror the data from the Joomla database.

You may thumb your nose at web developers who create ridiculous sites and clearly don't know what the hell they're doing, but you are only displaying your own ignorance. Clients drive website development, not developers, and for the vast majority of clients mobile web is something they just don't care about. And because of that nearly all of the tools available exclude the mobile web.

As a web developer, I rarely have to touch the subject of the mobile web, and when I do I basically have to present my clients with two options: 1. you pay me a non-trivial sum to create a second version of your site just for the mobile web or 2. you are restricted to sites built in tools which are mobile web enabled.

I can tell you from years of experience, unless it's part of their business model clients go for option 3: fuck the mobile web.

Too Late!

[qazwart]

The iPhone has pretty much killed the Mobile Web Page. The WAP protocol is dead. Other phones are beginning to support full page web browsing. By the end of next year, even Windows Mobile phones will have the full sized IE8 browser embedded in them. Many sites are even optimizing their webpages for the small screen mobile devices. Some have switched to narrow columns on their pages which allow users to quickly zoom in on the column and read an article. Some have specialized websites that are "mobile friendly". The best ones use CSS to determine whether or not you're a phone, and then display their website in an optimized fashion. (Take a look at Google's various sites or weather.com).

The mobile web is finally taking off because someone finally realized that you need a device that makes surfing the web practical and get a few million people to use it. Once sites realize that people are using their phones to browse them, these sites make phone optimized pages.

The only dark side to the mobile web are specialized phone apps. There are too many websites, that instead of creating mobile-friendly versions of their site, create a specialized iPhone app. This unfortunately takes pressure off the company to produce a truly mobile app. Flightaware.com is an excellent example of this. Their website is hard to maneuver around on an iPhone, so they made an app (which has fewer features) instead of improving their website.

Re:Slashdot, meet the Internet

[Anonymous Coward]

I seem to recall slashdot having a text based design just up to a few years ago. It wasn't in pace with the web for a long time.
Frankly I liked it better that way. It had an unfriendly feeling towards ordinary /I don't want to fix your pc/ people.

Design like it's 1999....

[ducomputergeek]

Seriously, that's what we did when creating our mobile ordering platform. Everything is in HTML with vanilla javascript for things like form validation. Then we created a mobile style sheet without graphics, other than a thumbnail of the logo, and it works on every mobile browser we've tried. iPhone, Blackberrys, Samsungs, Windows Mobile, Pre, various LG phones we've tried. Everything. Even over GPRS/Edge the pages load snappy.