Hey look at that, Microsoft is doing what it takes to deal with all the crappy mobile developers who don't know how to create web pages.
The Mobile Web should just work for everyone
21–30 of 127 posts
Re: The Mobile Web should just work for everyone
#22Poor Windows Phone team. This is a symptom of the ecosystem's indifference to the windows phone platform. Browser vendors implementing hacks to trick web apps into presenting the right content because web developers have learned that they can't rely on the browser to render content properly. I think there's a lesson in here about treating your ecosystem right.
At least they are accepting it and acting accordingly to where they stand in terms of market share. If you have low single digits of share, this is what you need to do to keep up.
Re: The Mobile Web should just work for everyone
#23Edit: The previous title was "Windows Phone's IE starts masquerading as mobile Safari to render pages properly" Looks like the webkit prefix tags are creating the new IE6. As usual, it's the web developers fault for not updating their CSS prefixes. http://css.dzone.com/articles/why-webkit-new-ie6-trap-vendor Mozilla, Opera and Microsoft have been complaining about this and Opera had already implemented support for th…
I'm not entirely sure this is an accurate analogy. vendor prefixes solved a need. Why should we be developing to the lowest common denominator? I think we should also watch out for link-bait SEO headlines such as "Why Webkit is the New IE6 (The Trap of Vendor Prefixes)"...
The problem isn't that developers should be developing for the lowest common denominator. It is that the prefixes are not being dropped by websites even after other browsers start implementing the feature, or it's that they continue to use the webkit prefix for new websites.
Re: The Mobile Web should just work for everyone
#24Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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" editorializing or not, i prefer the less vague title. serves as a great tldr;
The HN guidelines clearly state to use the original title, though.
if the policy is so strict, why not just automate the title extraction?
why give users a title choice and then have mods (who essentially hand-review all submissions) just revert it like robots?
Re: The Mobile Web should just work for everyone
#25And 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"
[deleted]
Re: The Mobile Web should just work for everyone
#26Edit: The previous title was "Windows Phone's IE starts masquerading as mobile Safari to render pages properly" Looks like the webkit prefix tags are creating the new IE6. As usual, it's the web developers fault for not updating their CSS prefixes. http://css.dzone.com/articles/why-webkit-new-ie6-trap-vendor Mozilla, Opera and Microsoft have been complaining about this and Opera had already implemented support for th…
I'm not entirely sure this is an accurate analogy. vendor prefixes solved a need. Why should we be developing to the lowest common denominator? I think we should also watch out for link-bait SEO headlines such as "Why Webkit is the New IE6 (The Trap of Vendor Prefixes)"...
> I'm not entirely sure this is an accurate analogy. vendor prefixes solved a need.
No. It tried to solve two different needs: proprietary stable APIs and unstable/in-flux specs. And the abuse of the latter forced browsers to drop the use-case entirely and hide features behind flags because developers could not be trusted to act responsibly, so it definitely didn't solve that problem.
> Why should we be developing to the lowest common denominator?
That's not developing to the LCD, that developers deploying half-specified and unstable APIs in production.
Re: The Mobile Web should just work for everyone
#27Poor Windows Phone team. This is a symptom of the ecosystem's indifference to the windows phone platform. Browser vendors implementing hacks to trick web apps into presenting the right content because web developers have learned that they can't rely on the browser to render content properly. I think there's a lesson in here about treating your ecosystem right.
I'd actually test on Windows Phone if they published images for Mac like they do with Desktop IE (and no, VMs inside VMs don't count).
It's actually possible to run WP8 under Fusion on a Mac, but MS need to add mouse cursor support: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/19402478/is-it-possible-t...
Re: The Mobile Web should just work for everyone
#28The sheer irony of it all.
Re: The Mobile Web should just work for everyone
#29Anyone 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.
That was the "before". They've added references to Android, iOS and WebKit.
Re: The Mobile Web should just work for everyone
#30"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…
ug, that's already a bad check, but if they insist, why not just:
/mobile/i.test(navigator.userAgent)