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As someone who's spent the better part of the last two years building a framework for mobile applications (jQuery Mobile) with the primary purpose of supporting
by johnbender 14y ago
As someone who's spent the better part of the last two years building a framework for mobile applications (jQuery Mobile) with the primary purpose of supporting as many platforms as possible I can tell you that mobile safari is hands down the best mobile browser out there today.
You could make the case that Apple's patent threats around the touch event spec are holding things back (not having a standard here is making a nightmare out of handling both click and touch events) or that turning off Nitro for the UIWebView control are a detriment to HTML "apps" but ultimately Android's browser is actually the biggest hindrance to HTML as a competitor.
I'm not an Apple fan (I don't buy their products for other reasons) but mobile safari blows every other mobile browser out of the water in terms of having sane implementations of HTML5 features and performance (css or otherwise).
- fpgeek 14y agoI'd certainly agree that Mobile Safari is superior to the stock Gingerbread browser (and even the stock ICS browser, to a lesser extent). That being said, are you asserting that Mobile Safari is "hands down" better than other members of the current generation of mobile browsers (Chrome for Android, Firefox Mobile, Opera Mobile, etc.)? To me, that seems like a much, much harder case to make.
- johnbender 14y agoFirst and most importantly lets highlight an exceptionally important issue that well equipped web developers _always_ seem to forget: 2.X was 84% of Android market share as recently as a month ago. ICS and Jellybean are tiny by comparison. Leaving that aside, Android's stock browser and Chrome still has serious issues with CSS based transformations and animations on non-trivial pages which mobile safari has handled with aplomb for the last 2 _major_ versions. This is not ICS, I'm talking about Jelly Bean. Even the newest flagship devices from HTC, the One X, can barely handle complex content animations. Again, toy examples have worked for a very long time but anything exceeding the compositing engines tile size just falls over completely. Unrelated to animations, here's a bug that I logged myself against 4.0: http://code.google.com/p/android/issues/detail?id=27959&can=1&q=fixed%20position&colspec=ID%20Type%20Status%20Owner%20Summary%20Stars http://code.google.com/p/android/issues/detail?id=27959&... Wherein a full width position fixed element fails to reflow on orientation change. https://github.com/scottjehl/Device-Bugs/issues https://github.com/scottjehl/Device-Bugs/issues If you look at the issues we've recorded over time you'll see there are plenty of iOS issues there too, but the degree of pain caused by them is vanishingly small when weighed against those we've dealt with from Android.
- fpgeek 14y ago> First and most importantly lets highlight an exceptionally important issue that well equipped web developers _always_ seem to forget: 2.X was 84% of Android market share as recently as a month ago. ICS and Jellybean are tiny by comparison. Fair point, but... the overwhelming majority of those users (2.2+) can use the latest Firefox, nearly all of them (1.6+) can use the latest Opera and most (2.3+) will be able to use the latest Dolphin when it comes out of beta. All of these browsers are leaps and bounds ahead the stock Android browser for 2.X and Android lets users change the default browser nearly seamlessly. Now, granted, none of these browsers is considered important today because they have little to no mobile penetration, but then, mobile web developers could influence that, if they chose to.