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» Meanwhile, back at the Forum... » Tog on iPhone » Safari on the iPhone: Congratulations, WebKit! » Copying Text » This is my iEntry |
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Forum Nokia has just started what I'm told is a series of articles about the browser. The first one is here. Nice work!
Bruce Tognazzini, UI design guru and my first UI design teacher, has posted a pretty positive review of the iPhone on his website,
AskTog. Near the end, he says:
However, while this first iPhone may not be the be-all and end-all, neither was the original Mac. With its 128k of memory, 8 MHz processor, and primitive, inflexible interface, users would be hard-pressed to get any real work done today. Nonetheless, the original Mac was a magnificent start, and iPhone is likewise.
Congratulations and kudos to both the WebKit community and the iPhone Safari team!
In case you haven't heard - hey, there might be someone out there who's really out of the loop :-), on Tuesday Apple announced that the iPhone ships with a version of Safari. Like the Nokia browser, it's apparent from the online demo that the iPhone version of Safari seeks to offer a rich, "desktop-like" web browsing experience on mobile devices.
My first impression: it's great to learn that Apple shares the vision of what some of us around here call the "One True Web". Check out this quote from The Obligatory iPhone Post on the Surfin Safari blog:
Think about the impressive browsing experience of the iPhone, as well as products like Nokia’s S60 Browser (based on WebKit) and the number of higher-end phones featuring Opera. Increasingly, you can browse the real web on a phone and have a high quality experience. There is less and less need for a special dumbed down version of the web just for mobile devices; instead we can have a single device-independent web that’s presented in the best possible way on a variety of devices.
I couldn't agree more. To me, based on the reaction throughout the blogosphere, it seems that Apple's high-profile announcement has already changed most people's perceptions and expectations of mobile web browsing. Now more than ever perhaps the "content designed for the desktop is simply unusuable on mobile devices" meme is finally wearing out.
Apple's move may also be a significant step in avoiding the dreaded Browser Wars in the mobile browsing market [*]. As we all know, browser fragmentation does not benefit anyone, so anything that helps to prevent a future recuurence of the desktop browser wars can only be a Good Thing.
So with Nokia and Apple mass producing pre-installed WebKit based mobile browsers, will the thriving, open-source WebKit project become THE dominant engine for mobile browsers?
Of course only time will tell, but I personally believe it looks like it's off to a strong start: WebKit is unquestionably going places.
To the WebKit community, my congratulations!! And to everyone else, why not get involved?
[* Some background is probably worthwhile. As another post noted the Nokia browser runs on top of a version of WebKit. WebKit, an active open-source project that's driven by Apple, grew out of a heavily modified branch of the KHTML and KJS code from the KDE project. Last year Nokia released the source to S60WebKit, a port of WebKit to the S60 platform, and the engines behind the Nokia browser. We are currently developing S60WebKit on a branch in WebKit's public Subversion source code repository. There is already work underway to merge the S60 branch to the WebKit main branch of development.]
This is just a note in response to a comment by Thomas asking when we're going to enable copying text from web pages. I can't comment about anything unreleased. Or more accurately, I can do it exactly once, after which I'd be working on job applications instead of browser blog entries! ;-)
However, we do appreciate comments and suggestions, and they do get noticed around here! Another place to go to suggest things you'd like in your S60 is the Wish List.
Like probably everybody else, now I want an iPhone! However, I couldn't help noticing that the announcement blurbs included this:
"Safari — the most advanced web browser ever on a portable device..."Maybe it's just me, but wouldn't you think that since our browser and Safari are pretty much the same thing... I know it's just marketing, the iPhone looks really cool, and everybody introducing a cool new product gets to lead the crowd in cheers, but geez. OK, harrumphing over. It's still a cool-looking phone.
"This question will be something asked by nearly all 21st-century children," smiled Zenough.
"Give me a break," growed Grit. "Crisp has it right; browsers come straight from hell. Kilos of special-case code, dealing with html designed by 9-year-olds -- no, wait, 9-year-olds would do a better job."
"Now, now," said Zenough. "Be patient. Not everyone in the world is a logical, organized software developer. The Web was designed to cope with that sort of thing."
"It was designed to dump all the weirdness and disorganization right on me," said Grit. "Why can't people stick to standards?"
"We have to keep extending ourselves, not to mention our browser, Grit. Would you really want the web to stay exactly the way it used to be?"
"Not the way it used to be" sneered Grit, "the way it was supposed to be in the first place."
"And what would that be?" asked Zenough. "A library, perhaps? A laboratory? A shopping mall?"
"How should I know?" snapped Grit. "Do I look like some kind of guru?"
"I'm just saying that the Web is many different things and it's the job of browsers to deliver all of it," said Zenough mildly. "And we don't know everything about how to do that. It's a moving target, so we have to keep moving with it."
"Yeah, yeah, I've heard it all before<" said Grit. "Go away; I have a bug to fix."
"I would, but this is my office," said Zenough.
By the time Grit got back to his desk, another one of his mobiles had disappeared. A black one.
Is everyone back from the holidays? Happy New Year from the Browsary!
Apropos of nothing, really, here's a tip that might be helpful to some. There are a few cases in which you might try to start the browser and get a message that it can't start because the phone thinks it's already running even though it isn't.
This was fixed a long time ago, but depending on your phone, the particular build of your browser, and possibly the phase of the moon, it might happen. If it happens to you, you'll need a third-party application that lets you interact with the processes on the phone. Look for and kill one of these tasks: Browser.exe (0x10008D39) or BrowserNG.exe (0x1020724D).
If you have no idea what that previous paragraph is talking about, not to worry; this problem is pretty rare. Thanks to reader yajtoh for reminding me about it!
