Comments on: Mobile Safari without the iPhone

By: Tagbox

Tagbox — Thu, 06 Dec 2007 13:43:51 +0000

In my opinion iPhone is too small to enjoy the web completely. It´s good for checking mail or information. But I´d never swap to iPhone or another mobile web device at all.

By: Hörmann

Hörmann — Tue, 04 Dec 2007 17:37:33 +0000

Mobile Safari is now poised to explode in terms of market share, possibly driving a lot of innovation in the handheld browser market, and developers now have a far less expensive means of obtaining and testing on the new browser.

By: SEO Company

SEO Company — Thu, 29 Nov 2007 10:48:45 +0000

Well i “think” from memory david, that the iphone delivers pages in a different manner.

Please someone correct me if I am wrong but it is essentially a screenshot that you are being shown, so the page is not actually processed by your phone, but a screenshot of it is.

By: David

David — Thu, 29 Nov 2007 07:51:29 +0000

iPhone doesn’t support Flash – for me this is a great weakness. How about Ajax and Javascript? Can we be reasonably certain that if a site functions properly in Safari, it should work pretty well in the iPhone?

By: Alexander Mannewitz

Alexander Mannewitz — Mon, 26 Nov 2007 18:03:58 +0000

I also tried browsing via iPhone, and discovered that some websites looking very poor.Safari is not an optimum for mobile phone browser.
Surely, there are alternative Mobile Browser, but well coded websites look always nice on the iPhone in that matter.

Conclusion: Safari on iPhone is not the best decisions, but if you near to Accessibility – your website will look in a proper way.

Additional:
Some Exploits were explored by different institutions so far, sure Apple fixed the security vulnerabilities. But,that fact lleft a bitter taste.

By: faruk

faruk — Fri, 23 Nov 2007 19:40:13 +0000

kL:

How do you know that Safari has a tiny market share compared to Opera Mini? Just because Opera Mini / Mobile are available on a much larger number of phones does not mean they are actually USED on those phones, but Safari on the iPhone and iPod Touch is almost guaranteed to be used at least once by the owner, but far more likely, used regularly.

If I had to go by my own stats on browsers (not from my own site but from a large collection of seriously high-profile sites), Safari has far, far bigger market share than Opera, when it comes to mobile phone usage. Would love to see the basis of your claims, if there is any.

By: Vectorpedia

Vectorpedia — Fri, 23 Nov 2007 18:24:50 +0000

Perhaps the most confusing element is the iPod Touch’s wireless feature. Obviously aimed at selling iTunes content, WiFi incidentally provides Web access via a special version of Safari and a YouTube application, but email is conspicuously absent.

By: kL

kL — Mon, 19 Nov 2007 16:33:29 +0000

I think the explosion is in mindshare, but not market share.

Safari still has tiny marketshare compared to Opera Mini. There’s magnitude more hardware out there that can run Opera Mini than Safari (MP3 players market is smaller than mobiles market, iPhone is trying to grab 1% of mobiles market).

And I think hype about Safari is hurting mobile web. I keep seeing more and more “iPhone-only” pages popping up, created by people who actually believe that iPhone has the first and the only “real” web browser on mobile device, completly ignoring Opera and S60.

Apple is encouraging iPhone specific tags and hacks and they even define size of iPhone’s UI elements in pixels, so sites can create (fragile!) pixel-pefect layouts for Safari only.

By: Toner

Toner — Mon, 12 Nov 2007 14:54:20 +0000

Having said that, if Opera makes more deals to get their browser onto phones as the default their market share will sky rocket from an already dominant (in terms of the fragmented mobile browser market, and according to some sources) position.

By: Lampen

Lampen — Mon, 12 Nov 2007 14:52:33 +0000

Sure, Mobile Safari will have the jump on other potential browsers in terms of development …but this only seems to be based on the sales of the iPhone and iPod Touch – what happens when (theoretically) Sony launch a similarly competitive device and the featured browser of choice is ‘not’ Mobile Safari, but something else (Like Opera)?