iPhone Rant #37: Mobile Browsing
Posted Tuesday, November 25th, 2008 at 4:22 pm by Alan Gallauresi (13 posts)
When it comes to professional obsession with browser rendering, I’ve never met anyone quite like our own Marissa. Between multiple-IE instance installs, Browsercam screenshots and an army of test machines, she could probably tell me what’s wrong with a site in OpenWeb on a NextStep machine from 1993.
About 6 months ago, she sent a call around the office for phones to view the mobile version of a site we’d just launched on. I gave her my LG Env2 and left my iPhone in my pocket. After all, the iPhone and mobile Safari were made to browse a site just like a “real” browser on a large display — and the iPhone interface handles this beautifully, with multi-touch zooming and double tapping that expands columns to the width of the phone. It works so great Apple just got sued.
Since then, however, a growing number of major websites are sniffing the iPhone user agent and presenting mobile versions. Sometimes this is a relatively positive experience – like Amazon’s mobile shopping version – and other times (I’m looking at you m.cnn.com) it’s just terrible.. an endless loop of trying to avoid an ugly, stripped-down content missing mobile version. And that’s where the rant comes in.
Apple: Let me change the user-agent on the iPhone. Sometimes I’d rather just pretend I’m in Firefox. More than sometimes.
Designers: The iPhone may be a device-on-the-go, but it’s nothing like a traditional mobile device. Stop feeding me CSS designed for a phones with a 100×60 pixel screen. If you don’t want to take the time to craft an iPhone version or your mobile version looks terrible on iPhoney, just give me the real thing.
Developers: Always give me a way to get to the “real” site and stay there.
Until the situation improves, iPhone users will just keep looking for backdoors to get the content they really want.
