How does the browser compare to iPhone and s3 stock browsers?

[SZRimaging]

Not out in the cold, but dead. That suggestion implies that all browsers not currently using WebKit switch to it. It implies conceding to WebKit, that their dominance of the mobile web allows them to dictate standards.

Apparently, StevesBalls thinks this is likely to happen. I doubt this is realistic, but I'm no web developer.



This is what I meant:

As it is now, the W3C standards and their implementations are separate entities, which would need to be merged. WebKit's implementation then defines/becomes the standard, thereby making it impossible, by definition, for WebKit to deviate from the standard. What previously would have been a proprietary feature, or a feature based on an incomplete standard, just becomes the standard.

After rethinking that comment, I realize it is unnecessary. If WebKit is the only rendering engine in use, globally, then there is no such thing as a proprietary feature. WebKit could also just choose not to release features based on incomplete standards and nix the tradition of prefixing altogether. Add to that a guarantee of perpetual backward compatibility and it amounts to the same thing. Then the two entities can remain separate.

Anyway, the requirement is that corporations with large corporate intranets shouldn't need to worry about proprietary functionality or changing standards incurring large maintenance costs down the road.

As you can see, I don't think about these things all too often :wink:



And yet we all rightly blame Microsoft for the idiocy which was IE6, which still plagues corporate intranet applications to this day. Microsoft barely cared about standards compliance back then. The reason Microsoft got away with it is because they had a monopoly on the desktop browser market. Today it is WebKit that has a de facto monopoly on mobile browsers. Many mobile websites are tested using nothing but WebKit, wile companies like Google seem more than happy to ignore Firefox, IE and Opera outright (leading to the suboptimal experiences described by deuxani), even though I recognize nothing that would warrant a proprietary WebKit implementation.

Are we not creating a new IE6 for the mobile web? Are you sure it is good policy to be unsure about weather or not Google and Apple are behaving responsibly (the whole blame thing)?

We have IE6 because W3C screwed MS. After they added all their custom functionality, in IE4/5, the W3C basically said we hate MS, so we will write the spec to oppose what MS is doing. Then MS got stuck in the position of either supporting the already written corporate applications, or moving to the standards and leaving all those corporations out in the cold. Obviously, the second choice was a bad idea, so they made IE6 to support what they could, and ever since they have been gradually work people off of their things to more standards compliant browsers. Honestly, for the position they were in, I think it was a fairly sane way to go about it. I used to be one of those "MS Haters", but the more I work in tech, the more I understand why they did some things.

Besides, Firefox is now my most hated browser. If I have a weird bug, it's almost always in Firefox...

 

[a5cent]

We have IE6 because W3C screwed MS.

Okay, that might be another way of looking at it.

I understand your point about browser developers wanting to integrate as many features as they possibly can. I just don't think that desire justifies the practice of skipping too far ahead of what is officially in the standard. I think MS doing it back then was just as stupid as Apple/Google doing it now. I agree MS did the best they could to get themselves out of the IE6 hole they were in. I certainly don't know what they could have done better. I just feel they shouldn't have gotten into that hole in the first place. The W3C might have screwed them, but Microsoft also provided them with the means to do so. H3ll, back then, as arrogant as Microsoft often was, I might have done the same. If the standardization process isn't working, then change the process, don't start cheating!

Anyway, your point is well taken.

Also, I've gone through the exact same development.

Also was an MS hater... software developer for 20 years... now I find myself defending Microsoft more than cursing over them (although I do that plenty often too). All in all, they have contributed far more to the good of the industry than any other company. How the world changes!

Concerning Google, I've gone through the exact opposite process.

Apple has always been Apple. :eck:

 

[snaqvi91]

So if IE is the most used browser in the world and IE10 shares the same core then why don't websites work the same on WP8 as they do on desktops?

Sent from my Nexus 7 using Tapatalk 2

 

[a5cent]

So if IE is the most used browser in the world and IE10 shares the same core then why don't websites work the same on WP8 as they do on desktops?

If we ignore the user interface, IE10 on WP8 (mobile) and W8 (desktop) are identical.

This is what happens:

When a browser connects to a website, it must identify itself (Firefox? Safari? IE? Browser version? desktop? mobile? etc.). Web developers can then choose to design multiple versions of the same website, and deliver one or the other version based on the browsers identity. For mobile devices, companies will often maintain a version of their website optimized for touch-based input and small displays.

This is what www.google.com does:

Browser identified as:	Action:
Desktop	Serve standard version that works everywhere (oversimplified, not quite correct, but close enough)
Mobile (WebKit* based)	Serve snazzy WebKit specific mobile version
Mobile (not WebKit* based)	Serve very basic, almost ugly standards based mobile version. Not that it would have to be that way. Google just isn't interested in offering anything better.

*Chrome, Safari, their mobile counterparts, and all browsers on Blackberry devices are WebKit based.

Make sense?

 

[snaqvi91]

So if IE is the most used browser I guess most websites are optimized to serve it well. In that case why can't IE10 just pretend to be desktop IE and get a great looking website?

 

[zeronoise]

Also, I've gone through the exact same development.

Also was an MS hater... software developer for 20 years... now I find myself defending Microsoft more than cursing over them (although I do that plenty often too). All in all, they have contributed far more to the good of the industry than any other company. How the world changes!

Concerning Google, I've gone through the exact opposite process.

Apple has always been Apple. :eck:

Lol almost exactly the same thing here...not 20 years of software dev though but do have a few years under my belt. Funny how ms was the big bad corp. and became for the people and google went from for the people to the big bad corp.

 

[Daniel Ratcliffe]

So if IE is the most used browser I guess most websites are optimized to serve it well. In that case why can't IE10 just pretend to be desktop IE and get a great looking website?

Because Google ignores the "Show Desktop version" option in Internet Explorer and still proceeds to throw up that shoddy circa-2006 mobile website. Don't know how it does it (I think it checks it in a different way), but it does.

 

[brmiller1976]

Google doesn't care about user experience, and it shows.

 

[a5cent]

Because Google ignores the "Show Desktop version" option in Internet Explorer and still proceeds to throw up that shoddy circa-2006 mobile website. Don't know how it does it (I think it checks it in a different way), but it does.

Hey Pal! ;-)

This is how it's done. Take a look at the user agent string with which IE10 on WP8 identifies itself;

Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; MSIE 10.0; Windows Phone 8.0; Trident/6.0; ARM; Touch; IEMobile/10.0; NOKIA; Lumia 920)

IEMobile/10.0	This means we want the mobile version of the website. Omitting this part means we are asking for the desktop version.
Windows Phone 8.0	If Google's website sees this in the user agent string, it will send the shoddy 2006-era mobile version, whether we asked for the mobile version or not. Google is the only site I know of that works this way.

Note that I don't work for Google, so I can't prove this is how it actually works, but it at least describes exactly how Google's website behaves.

So if IE is the most used browser I guess most websites are optimized to serve it well.

Yes, BUT only for non-mobile!

In that case why can't IE10 just pretend to be desktop IE and get a great looking website?

You can force IE10 on WP8 to do that. The "user agent switcher" app, which was mentioned and linked too at the start of this thread, can be used to fake being a Windows 7 based IE9. This will solve the issue mentioned by Paladinleeds, which I elaborated on above.

However, that can create as many problems at is solves, because differentiating between mobile and desktop browsers isn't just for laughs. Often times it serves an essential purpose.

For example, notice that with any mobile browser, touch input is generally used to pan the web page up, down, left or right. Basically, your finger is doing what is otherwise accomplished with the mouse wheel or the desktop browsers scroll bars. Now consider google maps. The user would expect to be able to touch the map and move it north, south east and west to. However, using the desktop version of google maps, you have no way of actually moving the map at all, since touch interaction will only pan the entire web page, never the map. The mobile version of Google maps overrides the browsers interpretation of touch input, so it is used to move the map instead of panning the page.

In other words, you can use the "user agent switcher" to fake being a Windows 7 based IE9, and although that will get you a nice looking version of Google maps, it will be completely useless on a touch based device without a mouse.

This is just one example. Many more exist where the differences between touch and mouse based input need to be dealt with explicitly, for a website to work as expected.

Make sense?