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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.'"
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.
You're special forces then? That's great! I just love your olympics!
I thought iPhone mobile browsers were all just wrappers around Safari but without access to the latest optimizations (there was some hubub a few months ago that the alternate browsers were all slower then Safari)?
So, this would have no relevance for developers targeting the web since they all use the same core and have the same user agent (we are still talking iPhone).
Android, of course, is a different story.
Goatse?
The GP's post is just to get you to click a link with the Goatse man's picture on it.
I'm a Firefox user on my laptop, and decided to download it for my Droid X. It runs so painfully slow, however, as well as having some odd behaviors (double-tap to zoom causes it to zoom WAY in, rather than the more measured zoom approach of the default Android browser) that I uninstalled it. Wish Mozilla would release a lighter weight, faster, more user friendly browser for mobile...
Would be nice to get some alternative browsers in WP7. Opera Mobile was announced by Opera, then ????? No Skyfire, either. Granted the built in browser works well, but the landscape view doesn't have the options for switching tabs and the zoom threshold is fixed so you cannot zoom in or out past a certain point if it doesn't zoom correctly. It doesn't reformat the text to fit the screen, either, which is one thing I've had a lot of luck with the Android browser.
The days when you only had to special case for IE and Netscape now seem nostalgic.
I'll use some exotic features on my fun sites, like the Aetheric Message Machine Company, which makes heavy use of downloadable fonts. (This requires making the fonts available in four different formats.) But if it has to work, it's back to vanilla XHTML 1.1.
There should be a law against submitting these to slashdot.
Here here! If you HAVE to, at least submit the print version people!
There's a separate Firefox Sync app. But that's not the full browser, obviously.
http://www.infoworld.com/print/164900
Ant(Dude) @ Quality Foraged Links (AQFL.net) & The Ant Farm (antfarm.ma.cx / antfarm.home.dhs.org).
On thing you don't often see mentioned is how well the UIs of the browsers work with very low resolution screens. There are a lot of Android devices out there with QVGA screens and Firefox's method of managing multiple open pages does not work on these devices (with more than two tabs open there is no easy way to get to the page you've selected from the thumbnails, and there is no fallback akin to the "open windows" list that the built-in browser users). It seems to require a display width of at least 480 pixels which QVGA does not have in either orientation.
Obviously you are never going to do an awful lot on a QVGA display so I can understand it not being a priority for the developers, but I find my phone surprisingly useful for reading some of the morning's news when I'm on a bus or train and there are things I might like to have FF on my poor little phone for. There are many people out there with such low-res devices so it would be nice for the developers to at least do cursory tests on them so they can state in the system requirements "may not be entirely usable on a display less than 480 pixels wide".