Mobile Browsers Alternatives Compared

snydeq writes "InfoWorld's Peter Wayner provides a look at 10-plus mobile browsing alternatives, from Firefox, to Opera, to SkyFire, to Mercury, and more — a rapidly evolving area fraught with confusion, especially for developers seeking to target the mobile Web. 'All of this turmoil is creating opportunities. On the iPhone, the formerly unknown browsers are quite nice. They run quite well and sometimes offer the ability to run Flash content directly because they have compiled Flash into the stack. There are a surprisingly large number of new names appearing, and some are beginning to be mentioned in the same breath as the big browsers that dominate the desktop,' Wayner writes. 'The turmoil is also changing the definition of what a browser might be. A number of small applications such as Instapaper, Flipboard, and Evernote never set out to be browsers, but people are using them to read Web pages.'"

Comments

So?

[rjstanford]

As a web developer, I'm going to make sure that my site works well in the "lowest common denominator" of mobile browsers, basically just basic Webkit functionality and standard sizing.

As primarily an iPhone user, I'm probably going to stick with whatever's built in, because the last thing that I want to do is to actively change my convenience-gadget to match someone's fancy website; the same reason that I'll never change my DNS servers to a random root server set just to access a .ihateicann domain. Sorry, don't care - your content is actually not that important to me.

Websites are, and should be, generally seen as a convenience for the user.

Oh, and extolling the virtues of changing the theme of a browser that runs on my phone? If I even see the browser itself most of the time, that's a big bucket of fail. The last thing I want to have to do is try to figure out the best way to see it.

Re:Firefox on Android

[Anonymous Coward]

Try the beta or aurora release of Firefox mobile. I found a speed improvement. Oh, and turn automatic updating on.