Re: [WSG] iphone should not be part of your url

[David Storey]

On 21 Jul 2008, at 01:24, Rimantas Liubertas wrote:

let's not forget that the iPhone's
browser is (as of right now) the largest mobile browser,

Not true.  Opera Mini has more active users per week than iPhones  
that exist
on the market.

http://blogs.computerworld.com/iphone_users_search_google_5000 :

"The Financial Times talked to Google at the Mobile World Congress in
Barcelona and found some interesting figures. iPhone users do an
average of 50 times more Google searches than their nearest
competitor."

not wanting to turn this into a popularity contest (this is about  
writing device and browser specific sites vs writing for the open  
web), don't believe all the statistics you read.  Google may say that,  
but there is one major flaw.  Opera Mini, didn't, at that time of  
writing, use Google is its search engine.  We had a deal with Yahoo at  
that time.  Obviously a device with Google is its default search  
engine would give them far more traffic.  Today we use Google, except  
for our most popular markets (Former soviet states), where we use  
Yandex.  You'll find Opera Mini is hugely popular on Yandex.  I've a  
company wide NDA with Google, so can't say anything about how any  
stats may have changed since we changed to Google as the default  
search engine in Opera Mini and Mobile.  Many stats are also heavily  
US centric.


http://localmobilesearch.net/?p=513 :

Roughly 85% of iPhone users access news and information and 59% search
on their devices. That compares with 13% and 6% in the broader market.

<...>

Again not true.  Take the HTC Touch Diamond.  It has both a  
superior screen
resolution, and similar hardware specs, and a full HTML browser  
(Opera
Mobile 9.5) with arguably greater standards compliance.

Cannot tell about the mobile versions, but from what I see going on  
with Webkit
it is ahead of all other engines.

In what ways?  I represent web developers in our roadmap discussions  
on what goes into our Core rendering engine.  As far as I can see  
Core-2.1 is on par or above other rendering engines in many areas,  
from DOM 3, HTML5, CSS3, SVG etc.  We lack some of the more eye candy  
aspects of CSS3 (such as border-radius and multiple background  
images), which is something I'd like to remedy in future versions, but  
are ahead in other areas of CSS3 (Full selectors support, dynamic  
media queries, generated content on any element, SVG as background- 
image etc.)  They do also have some experimental none standard stuff  
that they invented (that it is perfectly possible to do with SVG in  
Opera) that we don't have as they invented it, and Opera generally  
makes experimental builds for these types of new features, instead of  
putting them into a full release build (vendor specific features harm  
the open web).  I'm not sure if mobile safari has these things  
included however.

If there is anything you see that Opera is lacking that is useful for  
web developers then do let me know.  I'll do my best to analyse it and  
see if it can be added to the road map.


And unlike Mini it has a full
JavaScript implementation.

And let's see what's going on with JavaScript on iPhone:
http://daringfireball.net/2008/07/webkit_performance_iphone
I'm not sure what that proves.  iPhone wasn't tested against any other  
browser.  Mobile Safari can't ever be tested fairly for performance  
against other browsers as there are no other browsers on iPhone.  I  
think it may be against the agreement to make iPhone apps that  
anything with a JavaScript engine can't be made for iPhone without  
breaking the terms of agreement.  We do have videos of Opera Mini on a  
low end phone destroying the iPhone in performance (the original).   
This is unfair of course as Opera Mini compresses the page to get a  
big performance boost.




Regards,
Rimantas
--
http://rimantas.com/


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David Storey

Chief Web Opener,
Product Manager Opera Dragonfly,
Consumer Product Manager Opera Core,
Mobile Web Best Practices Working Group member

Consumer Product Management & Developer Relations
Opera Software ASA
Oslo, Norway

Mobile: +47 94 22 02 32
E-Mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Blog: http://my.opera.com/dstorey







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