I built smartphone web apps in 2005, and I can assure you there wasn’t a single smartphone browser even close to being worth a damn. Safari on the original ipho

I built smartphone web apps in 2005, and I can assure you there wasn’t a single smartphone browser even close to being worth a damn. Safari on the original iphone was the first decent browser on a phone, everything before that was garbage from a JS developer perspective. It is true that there were some desktop debugging tools (i remember a js debugger for IE6), but it was difficult to set up, and nothing like firebug or chrome dev tools. Live DOM inspection and editing didn’t exist. Despite the lack of tooling and the horrors of IE6 I still feel that was a golden age in web dev. It was a time of wild experimentation, where a single js dev could gain global notoriety by creating a cool hack or a nice library.