Slashdot Mirror
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!
The GP's post is just to get you to click a link with the Goatse man's picture on it.
You're sort of right. Opera on the iPhone doesn't use WebKit, it handles reading the page on the Opera server and then sends you the image of the page to your phone. The majority of other third party web browsers do get forced to use WebKit but there is a very good reason to use them over the default Safari app. I use Atomic Web and it's got adblocking built in as well as a true full screen mode. That's just 2 of the 10's of little additions that make it such a more enjoyable/feature rich experience than the standard browser bundled with the phone.
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...
WP7 doesn't allow native development. That will stop many alternatives.
It think it's worth pointing out, for anyone who might be confused, that's it's only Opera *Mini* (on any platform) that does this, not Opera Mobile (which isn't available on iOS anyway). I know it's pedantic, but I've seen plenty of people confused about this in the past, so I wanted to clarify in case anyone got the wrong end of the stick. Also to be pedantic, it doesn't return an image of the page, it returns a compressed binary format of the content - it still renders using the browser's own fonts, etc. That allows it to save the heavy lifting of page processing, but still reflow and resize the page once downloaded.