Developer: “Mobile Safari Is Today’s IE6″

By Giles Turnbull (6:45 am, Feb 09 2010)

Peter-Paul Koch is a man with opinions about the mobile web. And his latest opinion is a trifle controversial: Mobile Safari, he says, is this generation’s Internet Explorer 6. All the rage now, but destined to be hated by webdevs of the future.

Why so?

Because, says Peter-Paul:

“The iPhone has become an obsession. If we don’t pay attention, we’ll have a mobile web that only works on the iPhone. And then we’ll have the real mobile web that wasn’t made by us and doesn’t give a shit about web standards and best practices. Worse, it seems web developers are happy with this state of affairs.”

And what’s more:

“Mentioning Nokia is the mark of the rude boor. The man of discernment mentions the iPhone. And mentions it and mentions it and mentions it. And then mentions the iPad, to show he is open to non-iPhone devices. The bigger the better.”

It’s time to switch off the reality distortion field, says Peter-Paul. Too many people are concentrating all their efforts developing or optimizing solely for Mobile Safari, to the detriment of all other platforms and browsers. That’s what people did back in 2000, when IE6 was the most popular browser on the desktop. Today, developers are campaigning for IE6 to be killed off as soon as possible.

Some commenters have taken issue with Peter-Paul’s swear-strewn ranting, and some with the statistics he cites, but his point is a fair one: the web was always supposed to be an open experience. No matter how much better the iPhone/iPad/iPod might be as a mobile browsing experience, developing content that only works on those devices, ignores everything else, is a backward step.

15 comments »

About the author

Giles Turnbull is a freelance writer in England. He writes for the Press Association and The Morning News. He has a website you can ignore and a Twitter account you needn't follow.

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Posted in iPad, iPhone, News, Opinions |

http://www.snubcommunications.com Craig Grannell
“developing content that only works on those devices, ignores everything else, is a backward step”
And that’s something almost no-one dev I know is doing anyway. People are developing to standards and switching to a mobile style sheet via CSS3 @media width targeting.
The issue he has, however, seems centred around testing websites, with designers testing on iPhone and if things work, that’s fine. The thing is, I can, for the price of a copy of XP, get every major browser running on my Mac. But to have a collection of mobile devices to test on would be prohibitively expensive. Thing is, if mobile devices had browsers that, like iPhone’s, conformed to web standards, there’d be no problem anyway (in the same way that I can design a site using WebKit as an initial guide, and it’ll almost certainly work in Gecko and Presto engines, which are very compliant, but will sometimes need ‘fixes’ for Trident, given that IE’s still a heap of shit).
http://gilest.org Giles Turnbull
Craig: good point. I’ve never met any devs who do it either. But Peter-Paul’s post is *so* full of anger, I can only assume he’s meeting them everywhere he goes. But you make a good point about mobile browsers conforming to web standards.
http://www.macpredictions.com MacPredictions
Craig: yes – that’s the key difference. The problem with IE6 is not that it was too popular, but that it had poor standards support. Whereas Mobile Safari and Webkit are the poster child for standards compliance. Had Microsoft done such a good job with IE6, we wouldn’t be in the mess now.
Long may Safari’s popularity reign!
http://geek.derekmartin.ca Derek Martin
The big difference is that Apple can PUSH MobileSafari updates to its entire install-base any time. In fact, it has already released several updates to the iPhone OS. By contrast, IE6 is frozen in time, unable to auto-update.
MrCrispy
I’m thinking this guy is just complaining for the sake of complaining. Mobile safari supports everything the desktop version does and, oddly, is one of the few browsers that supports nearly all the current html5 spec. How can someone even come remotely compare it to the atrocity thy was ie6?
The only things mobile safari doesn’t support is flash and I could not care less about that. I’ve never liked flash to begin with. I dint know, when I read this I got the feeling there was an underlying “wahh no flas boo hoo” thing going in. I could just be reading too far between the lines though.
Oh well, if this guy doesn’t want to develop for mobile safari then let him. Not going to bother me any. As long a he doesn’t create all his sites in 100% flash then I’ll still be able to view them in my iPhone.
Wayne
1) Mobile Safari is a full, standards supporting browser (minus Flash, no loss there) and technically doesn’t require any special proprietary programing. Rather than whine that the iPhone actually gets used to look at the web, why doesn’t Koch agitate for all the other browsers be made into something that people can actually use to look at full web pages. The problem here isn’t that developers put up mobile pages that work best on the iPhone, it’s that most mobile browsers are crap.
2) Considering the constantly rising share of mobile browsing that Mobile Safari gets in browser traffic surveys, what exactly would he like people to do? Cause no sane web developer that wants to increase traffic is going to ignore the most popular platform for mobile browsing when deciding which device their mobile site should look best on.
Alfred
Ahem…
IE6 is hated because it doesn’t support modern web standards.
Mobile Safari is one of the most standards-supporting browsers around.
IE6 is hated because Microsoft decided to suspend all development of it for many years, stifling innovation.
Mobile Safari is still in active development by Apple.
IE6′s rendering engine was only used by IE. So you only could tailor it to that one browser.
Mobile Safari uses Webkit, which is also used by Chrome.
Further, does it matter what some web developer few people have really heard of thinks?
No.
http://www.hoggworks.com/ Brian Hogg
“The only things mobile safari doesnâ€™t support is flash”
It also lacks Java support and near as I can tell it doesn’t have any accessible plugin architecture at all, unless you’ve jailbroken the thing, yes?
It’s rather baffling to see people talk about how open and compliant the browser is when it’s a locked-down experience that doesn’t support plugins, nor let you run bookmarklets, nor customize it in any way.
Hell, it doesn’t even have in-page search! (though that’s not a compliance thing, just a massive annoyance)
CaryMG
The web’s gonna be optimized for Mobile Safari ….
Everyone latch on to a stable, fast standard-bearer of InterNet compatibility ?!?
How *dare* they !!11!!!
This guy’s a fuckin’ tool & should, along with his obscelescence, be relegated to the dustbin o’ history.
Tom
As a mobile dev I highly disagree with this. Mobile Safari is today’s Firefox for the mobile platform. The other browsers on blackberries and even early android devices ARE NOT standards compliant.
Every web developer develops to Firefox and then makes it work for other browsers from there. The reason is that Firefox is the standard. Developers know that Firefox reasonably follows standards.
Before the iPhone, there were no browsers that reasonably did this on the mobile platform. You can make a mild case for Opera, but it does not have reach that mobile safari does.
With Android 2.1, now android browsers have pretty much the same capabilities and same support for standards that mobile Safari has. Mobile Safari is setting a trend for complying with standards in much of the way Firefox has for regular web development.
If you ask me, you have this backwards. Mobile Safari = Firefox and the other mobile browsers = IE 6.
Rubber Johnny
Maybe someone should intro him to crispy chips with OK Sauce.
That’ll calm him down I’m thinking.
Meanwhile the world moves on.
http://ObamaPacman.com ObamaPacman
Completely wrong.
Safari is based on WebKit. Most other phone makers have started offering WebKit based browser. So, no it’s not iPhone exclusive.
Also, you don’t see other browser makers basing their browsers on IE6. Not the same.
http://www.my2unes.net Triniti
well when HTML 5 can show the Full Sail website
http://www.fullsail.com just as the desktop dose including all the
animations and transitions, then I will be a believer in it.
there is no other means to view sites that have artistic styles
and creative transitions to them!
The folks who hate flash don’t understand the reason one uses it.
As fo me the sites I build are flash based because I want the viewer
of my sites to have an experience of being entertained
by nice transitions and animations, as well as letting the viewer
interact with the site in the most creative visual way!
I don’t wish to use alot of text but rather use elements
that reach out at you and speak you in a way that’s far more
creative that just reading a static page!
I am a digital artist!
if no flash then what is available for me to use to
create such sites!
if HTML 5 can do all that flash can do and do it better then
I will with open arms embrace it otherwise
my iPhone and soon to be ipad will not be able to disply all my
hard work!
http://www.cafefurniture.org Libby Murray
Mobile browsers are still kind of crude if you compare it to the desktop browsers we use on PC.*-,
http://www.wrenchsetkit.com Brooke Morris
mobile browsers would become greatly popular in the next few years`’.