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what?? seriously, what??


(well, at least he didn't use a car analogy)

And lets not forget Opera Mini! I have used it almost exclusively on my phones since 2003.

Me too! I've used it since it came available for WM6 and I'm using it now on my iPhone.

Long live Opera Mini!

By the way... one thing not many people notice is that Opera works really really well on places where you loose your connection all the time, such as on a train.


So next time you guys are stuck on a train, give Opera Mini a try!

That's quite a feat, considering Opera Mini launched in 2005-2006 ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opera_Mini#History )

Back in 2003, you probably used Opera Mobile - which is a separate thing.

Well, to be fair, Firefox on Android has *SUCKED*, in so many ways, until very recently. Anyone trying to say it doesn't either has a skookum SoC, or hasn't really used Firefox until recently.

Trying to use Firefox prior to Sept 2012 on a 1 GHz single-core SoC was frustrating, and then some.

Yeah, those old foxes where kinda meh, but these latest releases really fly even on the crappiest hardware (including sub $60 Chinnese tablets).

Once the open source flash support is added we can finally root-uninstall the stock browser + chrome and live ever happy after

Don't even get me started on Firefox Mobile.

Even if the browser was okay, All the mobile browsers that aren't Webkit render pages badly because a most developers use the -webkit extensions.

Edited 2012-12-03 20:22 UTC

It's the problem of illiterate developers, not the problem of browsers. Back in the day many sites were IE only either. That changed, thanks to Firefox to a big degree.

Edited 2012-12-03 21:33 UTC

Not really IMHO. Two reasons:

* Yet again whoever allowed vendor specific extensions made a massive mistake, they assumed that web developers would adhere to recommendation (not many do, which is ignoring the reality of the situation ... they took an idealistic and not pragmatic view). At some point they could have made a line in the sand ... but they didn't have the balls.

* Companies only care about the top X% support, Webkit was there first, was ahead of the game and it was abused because people have mouths to feed.



I could go on about this .. as this is my trade.

But IE was soo damn superior at the time compared to the competition and there were no real standards in place (much like today) there was little point taking anything else seriously.

You can rage all your want about that, but at the time standards supports was a joke and the only browser that came near to it was IE.

IE didn't try to focus on standards, it tried to hijack them. Luckily it failed. I don't think Webkit tries to hijack standards like IE did, but custom extensions obviously complicate things. The situation improves with time though.

No, it did try to focus on standards. IE 8 was the first browser that implemented XHTML 1.1 and CSS 2.1 correctly. (Firefox 2 BTW came out at the same time as IE8 and that supported far fewer web standards and has far more bugs).

IE 6 was working against a draft standard at the time and said draft standard was changed after its release and they Microsoft couldn't change it because they promised to support it for as long as they have.

The equivalent browser at the time was Netscape ... and that didn't give f--k about standards.

Also recently, Microsoft have actually been speaking to the web developers on why they don't always support the latest stuff.

This is what I said about it:

http://luke-robbins.co.uk/internet-explorer-and-why-they-are-behind...

Here is the original video:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GvtHb6tBx6Y

The long of the short of it is, that IE is used by the Enterprise and Enterprise customers expect a certain set of features to be support to browser EOL. If they get include standards that aren't finalised they find themselves forever supporting an incorrect standard (see IE6 comment I made above).



No it won't improve with time, because other browser that aren't webkit based are being forced to support the -webkit extensions on mobile.

Webkit it the IE6 of the Mobile browsers.

Edited 2012-12-03 23:15 UTC

You sure that you got the dates right?
IE8 released 2009, while FF2 is 2006.

That's the point. Any kind of interest for standards in IE was shown only when Firefox started seriously taking away IE market share. Before that, when IE was too dominating, MS didn't care about standards whatsoever.

Back then we had IE6-devs, now we have MBP-devs...


A (way too expensive) webdev agency created a new "modern" web page for a business I know. It turns out that new site renders correctly only on MBP-retina and Safari. Guess what their response was when I complained that it looked like shit on a standard 1366x768 PC laptop...

Not surprised in the least.

Works on my machine is an unfortunate reality.