WebKit, Mobile, and Progress. Alex Russell responds to PPK’s analysis of the many different WebKit variants in today’s mobile phones, pointing out that the replacement cycle and increasing quality of WebKit in more recent phones means the situation still looks pretty good.
Sign in with 
OpenID
Frankly, I'm way more inclined towards PPK's pessimism about mobile browsers. The uptake of (new & good) WebKit-equipped phones is good and getting exponentially better in the US & Western Europe. But if you have to support a broader range of markets, then you're still hamstrung by old phones with old browsers that support a meager subset of HTML.
Desktop web developers love to kvetch about supporting IE6, but the renderer in mobile IE is only now catching up to IE6 in terms of standards support.
So, as much as I'd love to be sanguine about the evolving landscape of mobile web development, the fact remains that we need to be as mindful as ever about the core lessons of progressive enhancement and bring those techniques into the mobile sphere.
Matt Henry - 10th October 2009 01:23 - #
I’m worried about the “if it exists, we have to support it” attitude.
There’s no sense in spending time and effort complicating your code (and thus slowing down future as well as current development) in order to support a phone that twelve people have, when none of them use the internet on it.
It’s admirable to want to give a great experience to everyone who could possibly come and look at your mobile site. But deciding who to support is best worked out by a reasonably detailed cost/benefit analysis. I’d like to see discussion of how to do those.
ugg pas cher - 28th October 2011 03:36 - #