The Mobile Web should just work for everyone

"In general, our advice is to develop a responsive site that can adapt to the capabilities of different devices. If you choose to build a mobile-specific experience then we recommend looking for the sub-string "mobile" in the user agent string to determine when to deliver mobile optimised content:"

    function isMobile() {
        return navigator.userAgent.toLowerCase().indexOf("mobile")>=0;
    }

This is really the best we can do after twenty years of the WWW?

Re: The Mobile Web should just work for everyone

#5

Post by nailer » Mon, Aug 04, 2014, 3:48 PM UTC

Anyone know what the IE11 update User Agent actually is, merely out of curiosity?

Re: The Mobile Web should just work for everyone

#6

Post by ihuman » Mon, Aug 04, 2014, 3:50 PM UTC

higherpurpose wrote: post #2

And the title will be changed by mods in 3...2..1... even though I think it's the more appropriate/non-misleading one.

The title is almost always changed if the post's title is different from the submission's title. There usually isn't a good reason to editorialize the title when submitting to HN, unless the title is something like a "Show HN."

For anyone seeing this comment after the title has been changed, OP's title was "Windows Phone's IE starts masquerading as mobile Safari to render pages properly"

Re: The Mobile Web should just work for everyone

#7

Post by recursive » Mon, Aug 04, 2014, 3:51 PM UTC

iron_ball wrote: post #4

"In general, our advice is to develop a responsive site that can adapt to the capabilities of different devices. If you choose to build a mobile-specific experience then we recommend looking for the sub-string "mobile" in the user agent string to determine when to deliver mobile optimised content:" function isMobile() { return navigator.userAgent.toLowerCase().indexOf("mobile")>=0; } This is really the best we can do…

Browser identification is an arms race. It harkens back to the original user agent wars near the turn of the millenium. I think it's unlikely to ever have a solid way to identify browsers. If one is developed, it will be used by (bad?) developers as an exclusion check for their fancy content. That gives other browsers an incentive to lie. I think the whole concept is inherently unstable for this reason.

Re: The Mobile Web should just work for everyone

#8

Post by ChrisClark » Mon, Aug 04, 2014, 3:52 PM UTC

Isn't this basically the state of the User Agent strings across all browsers? The strings are a messy combination of different browsers, versions and rendering engines.

Re: The Mobile Web should just work for everyone

#9

Post by misterbwong » Mon, Aug 04, 2014, 3:52 PM UTC

iron_ball wrote: post #4

"In general, our advice is to develop a responsive site that can adapt to the capabilities of different devices. If you choose to build a mobile-specific experience then we recommend looking for the sub-string "mobile" in the user agent string to determine when to deliver mobile optimised content:" function isMobile() { return navigator.userAgent.toLowerCase().indexOf("mobile")>=0; } This is really the best we can do…

No. Feature detection (which is also mentioned in the article) is far superior

Re: The Mobile Web should just work for everyone

#10

Post by misterbwong » Mon, Aug 04, 2014, 3:53 PM UTC

nailer wrote: post #5

Anyone know what the IE11 update User Agent actually is, merely out of curiosity?

This wasn't immediately clear to me as well. From what I can see, they just mirrored their change in IE11 desktop and added "like Gecko" to the end of it.