Funny they should say that now, seeing as how they used to think the web should work for everyone, as long they were using IE.
The Mobile Web should just work for everyone
111–120 of 127 posts
Re: The Mobile Web should just work for everyone
#112This is just another reason why all browsers (not just mobile) should be reporting their screen size. As in, the actual height/width. Not pixels. Pixels lie and so do browsers, actually. If I knew that the user's browser was 3 inches wide I could choose a point-based font size that's appropriate. It would also be trivially easy to scale font and image sizes up or down based on that knowledge. Especially if I'm using…
> This is just another reason why all browsers (not just mobile) should be reporting their screen size. As in, the actual height/width. That's completely useless, 1cm on a mobile device and 1cm on a desktop are not the same for a user, to say nothing of 1cm on a TV screen, an Oculus Rift (where would you even measure size there?) or a projector (which would require a rangefinder for precise estimation and will probab…
> 1cm on a mobile device and 1cm on a desktop
You lost me. How is 1cm on a mobile device not the same as 1 cm on a desktop. Yes, they have different pixels resolutions within that centimeter, but the length of a centimeter doesn't change.
Well, unless the engineers are fudging the standard so marketing isn't seen to be lying.
Re: The Mobile Web should just work for everyone
#113It's silly that all the anti-IE comments are being downvoted. IE8, 9, 10 and 11 are still complete shit and the debug tools are even worse. Microsoft talks a good game about implementing all these standards but I experience bugs regularly in Trident, even when I was developing something specifically for it a few months back. It's a completely primitive and glitchy browser that doesn't need to exist.
Firefox has had its problems too recently, but at least it's open source and they're trying. Microsoft has literally nothing going for them on this front.
Re: The Mobile Web should just work for everyone
#114I thought en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/UAProf
Was designed for this exact thing
Re: The Mobile Web should just work for everyone
#115The mobile web is just a disaster all around. I remember when I got my iPhone in '08, the browsing experience was amazing. Most sites were still relatively simple, and whatever highly non-standard tricks Safari played to do things like text reflow worked great on that small 3.5" screen. Half a decade later, I'm profusely disappointed with Chrome's browsing experience on my Nexus 5's massive 5" screen. Even on HN, I c…
I'd recommend ihackernews.com for browsing HN on mobile (not my website). I use it daily, and it's much better than the completely non-responsive HN site. I'd like to join you on this mobile rant for a bit. Mobile browsing completely sucks right now. Whether it's websites that don't know how (or don't bother) to design with mobile in mind, or websites that do try to design with mobile in mind, and go completely over…
Mobile websites like ihackernews annoy me in a different way: there is no way to zoom without going into settings.
Basically I think that if a site is made for mobile, pinching should change the text size.
At least this is the case on Android. Perhaps iOS is different.
Re: The Mobile Web should just work for everyone
#116Good. UserAgent-based feature detection needs to be broken every few years as it is a gross abuse (Aggravation; like Rant)
I'm blown away people see this and react with "if we had more of a singular monoculture, this wouldn't be an issue", when the exact opposite is true. Making it difficult/near impossible for newcomers/outliers to operate in the browser space is very unlikely to improve things in the long run.
I'm sure Opera had many reason to cave in and throw away their rendering engine in favor of a webkit fork, but I suspect having to continuously swim upstream against the ever growing proprietary extensions and broken browser detection logics out there might have played a role.
-webkit prefixes are supposed to stash away experimental features until they get standardized, but with the webkit monoculture, they become de facto standard as their implementation trickle through the webkit forks and releases. That's harmful.
Perhaps having faster standard tracks where prefixed features don't have time to become second nature for webdevs, and fostering a culture of "proprietary prefixes don't belong in production code" could help here.
Re: The Mobile Web should just work for everyone
#117Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yes. It feels philosophically unfair to complain about, but I want a Windows Phone emulator for OS X. Of course, Windows users don't get an emulator for iOS either, but Apple has popularity on their side.
Couldn't you technically run Windows 7/8 under VMWare and then run the Windows Phone tools under that? VMWare has nested virtualisation (at least on Workstation 10 on Windows, think its there on Fusion or the Paralles options). And given MS give free VMs for testing IE on Macs too, your a step closer...
You can get a free VM from MS to test under IE at https://modern.ie/en-us/virtualization-tools
On the mac, they are support VMWare, VirtualBox and Parallells.
Re: The Mobile Web should just work for everyone
#118Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Looks like the webkit prefix tags are creating the new IE6. This bothers me. Webkit isn't some ancient browser that is has remained stagnant for years until google/apple decided to do something about it. Nobody spends hours debugging their perfect layouts in webkit. Webkit isn't holding the entire web back. It's just a poor comparison. I browse mobile web in mostly firefox mobile, and I don't think I've ever seen a…
No, the new IE6 :) like back when IE6 was king. Meaning that web developers make their site work only in webkit and screw the rest of us.
I guess it's a matter of perspective. My experience with IE6 was mostly being a teenage hobbyist webmaster way back when FF vs IE6 was in full spin - I remember being proud of coding standards compliant websites that worked perfectly in FF just to have it completely break in IE6, then having to spend hours fiddling with the HTML/CSS to get it to the point where it worked in IE6. Frustrating times.
That's why I don't really see the comparison. When I think of IE6 I think of the hours I wasted trying to make it work right. I'm not currently coding IE mobile websites, then checking it on a webkit browser, having everything be broken and then spending hours trying to fix it.
Re: The Mobile Web should just work for everyone
#119Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Looks like the webkit prefix tags are creating the new IE6. This bothers me. Webkit isn't some ancient browser that is has remained stagnant for years until google/apple decided to do something about it. Nobody spends hours debugging their perfect layouts in webkit. Webkit isn't holding the entire web back. It's just a poor comparison. I browse mobile web in mostly firefox mobile, and I don't think I've ever seen a…
The comparison is apt, just not entirely. It isn't a comparison of IE6 vs Webkit, it's of developer reactions to them. For a long time, IE6 ruled the roost, so developers used IE6 as their development target. Browsers that moved beyond it, or implemented things differently (often correctly) were ignored. On mobile, webkit rules the roost. Developers use it as their development target. Browsers that move beyond it or…
I mentioned in another comment that when I think of IE6, I think of the hours spent fiddling with the HTML/CSS that works in FF/Chrome but not in IE6 because of browser bugs that were never fixed and standards not followed. It's why I think it's a bad comparison.
Re: The Mobile Web should just work for everyone
#120Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Looks like the webkit prefix tags are creating the new IE6. This bothers me. Webkit isn't some ancient browser that is has remained stagnant for years until google/apple decided to do something about it. Nobody spends hours debugging their perfect layouts in webkit. Webkit isn't holding the entire web back. It's just a poor comparison. I browse mobile web in mostly firefox mobile, and I don't think I've ever seen a…
Most of my professional time these days is spent on mobile/tablet websites for a major automobile manufacturer. And there are days when we absolutely do obsess over layout and other issues introduced by mobile safari itself. On the release of iOS 7, we actually probably burned a month working with a bug that we never found a solution to (which, fortunately, was fixed with iOS 7.1). That last part underscores that we'…
I think you forget how bad it was with 2006 desktop. So many CSS hacks. We take our div layouts for granted but if you dared venture away from the standard table layouts of the early 2000s you were in for a lot of debugging for browser quirks.
Nowadays at least I code responsive layouts to target screen resolution, and its gotten leagues better. Sure there's a few quirks in separate browsers and things aren't necessarily ideal, but it sure beats the days of "I wish I could use xxxx CSS property but I can't because only 2% of my users would be able to render it".