YAMB - Yet Another Mobile Browser
I’m the business development guy for Nokia browsing. This is my personal opinion, not an official Nokia statement.
Mozilla just announced they are seriously investing in taking Firefox mobile.
See Russell Beattie’s comments on this:
… That said, all the options suddenly available seem almost crazy doesn’t it? We’ve gone from almost no advanced mobile browsers just a few years ago, to a ton of choices. It makes you wonder if Mozilla could do something else to enhance the mobile web, rather than re-creating the wheel with yet another browser that works on the phone…
He’s right — fragmentation of mobile browsers has been a disaster.
Firefox / Mozilla clearly has the strongest OSS browser community and is the richest in features, so this is very interesting to us. I love Firefox, live in it.
But I think the LAST thing the mobile device world needs is Yet Another Mobile Browser. We’re still suffering from the mobile browser fragmentation that web content developers have to deal with: Openwave, Obigo, Nokia, Opera (Mobile & Mini), Microsoft, Access, Blazer, Danger, Picsel, Thunderhawk, Novarra, etc… each with multiple versions, on multiple devices with a range of capabilities.
Today, WebKit is becoming the de-facto mobile industry standard: S60, iPhone, Motomajx (Linux smartphones), and soon several other mobile platforms and web content creation tools. A startup, Pleyo, is building a business around porting & supporting WebKit on mobile (they have it running on the Nokia N800). WebKit is small and fast. Nokia, Apple and others have invested a lot in adapting WebKit to mobile, and Nokia will support anyone working to port it to new platforms. We want to see one common, open browser engine in the mobile world.
So let’s talk about how the whole open source browser community can work together to eliminate fragmentation on mobile devices. “Browser wars” are not going to help anyone. Making sure that mobile browsing is open and not proprietary is.
I’m sure my comments sound terrible to people working on Mozilla, but please step back and look at the big picture. Mozilla & Firefox are fantastic — thank you! But how is it useful to compete on mobile devices, where fragmentation or proprietary solutions are a worse enemy than any particular feature or technology? Let’s work to combine the best of WebKit and Mozilla, and get mobile right, for everyone’s benefit.
–Franklin
>>WebKit is becoming the de-facto mobile industry standard
Today, WebKit runs on yet another mobile platform. Wake3 just announced WebKit for Windows Mobile.
See a video demo at: http://www.wake3.com
Franklin,
Excellent point about YAMB. But having the option to use FFX over the others is a plus, right?
As you stated FFX does have the strongest OSS browser community and being that our mobiles are the “computer replacements” doesn’t it seem justifiable that consumers have more than one browser option?
I might have taken that off-topic a bit, but thats just my opinion.
I don’t see the point here. What is wrong with diversity? There is one internet… - you make it sound like we have to develop specifically for each of these mobile browsers. With one internet - also for mobile devices - diversity is only going to drive development.
If you want an uniform browser - maybe we should united with the Opera browser? Thats the most widespread browser when it comes to platform ports… Never mind Firefox or WebKit…
@Joar: My point is *exactly* that diversity in browser core engines does not help anyone. Diversity in browser UI, innovation in presentation, cross-application interaction, etc. — great! The more the better. But the core rendering engine simply needs to process HTML, CSS, and ECMAScript in a standard way, and display it consistently. The less “diversity” in how browsers render web content the better.
Sharing the same, common OPEN browser engine would be great for the whole mobile world. I don’t believe Opera’s engine is open.
Thanks for the comment.
If you think fragmentation is a big problem, why don’t you resolve it within your company before trying to persuade the world?
http://browser.garage.maemo.org/
fragmentation is a problem only if I can’t have Firefox on my mobile !
having Firefox both on my mobile and my pc is the only way to have a true reliable sync of my personnal datas
and after firefox, I want thunderbird too !
COMPLETELY disagree. If you’re all following the rules of rendering, it’s not a problem. WebKit has traditionally stuck to the rules and so has FireFox. IE 5.5/6 for mobile phone? Now THAT’S scary!
Sorry, but I don’t agree with you. On the desktop, by the coming of firefox, we have assisted to a “good war” between browser vendors: opera, ms, apple and firefox are working on standard support and moving forward web technologies… one rendering engine is not so ok for innovation.
As roc pointed out, isn’t Nokia actually part of the problem here?
How many different browsers are used by Nokia on just Nokia phones?
Do not confuse “Wars” with competition. I do not want a closed communication technology in a open shell again.
It is nice to see another big boy in the landscape.
I tend to agree with Franklin while it’s a tough discussion. Fragmentation is not helping here: look at mobile linux and how a crap it is to work with various “pure distros”.
I’m not saying here that one browser is the way to go, but we are here in a situation where mobile browsing still needs to find its way and has not proven to the end user it’s worth the price to pay.
At Pleyo we believe that mobile browsing has the strength to become an unified UI engine, to keep the experience consistent accross the different apps. It will be very hard, and even more if we have to rely on many browsers…
Jean-Charles Verdié
@Joar: I’m afraid you misunderstood what Franklin wanted to express. He was talking about one core rendering engine that is fully capable of digesting web pages according to standards. And as to the diversity: it’d be up to browser makers to make their product different from others by presenting content differently, offer alternative services exploiting OS services underneath, etc.
You know, I initially disagreed with Franklin, now I see his point in having as less (1?) standards-compliant rendering engine as possible.
@Robert O’Callahan, @Michael Kaply: Fair point — Nokia has too many browsers on different device families today. But we are working hard to address that — stay tuned.
Just because we haven’t succeeded in unifying Nokia yet doesn’t invalidate the goal or the principle. Nokia is a huge organization.
Still don’t agree… The browser developemnt is not driven by the people building skins for a specific browser core. The real value in Mozilla Corp. lies in the Gekko engine, not in Firefox. If the developent of Gekko stoped due to no incentives to develop it further, the Internet would not develop in any specific direction.
This has all been tested when IE 5 - 6 (Trident) was the dominant browser engine on the scene. If there had been no alternatives to the Trident rendering engine, we would have phones with 500 Mb of Ram and PC like processors, just because the Trident skinned browser would not run proporly on a lower configured device. I you look at Nokia S60 phones they may have a bit of memory, but the processor is generally weak. Still the do run a browser. The browser cores in mobile devices has been developed and optimzed in order to run well on low resource devices. Without competition, I am sure the browsing experience on our phones would not be as good as it is today.
I can see that the great diversity in mobile browsing, causes problems for many users. However, I think that in the not so distant future, the device web-browser scene will look quite a bit like the desktop browser scene. Four browser cores will be used: Trident (or something spawned for it), Gekko, WebKit and Opera. All the others will disapear due to the high maintainance cost of a proper core engine.
Ok, so you we probably talking about open source browsers. Well, thats a entirely different discussion.
I am trying to make my site http://www.gsoindependent.com viewable and usable on pdas and cells.
Is there a way to make a div tag viewable only on mobile phones and nothing else? I just want to put text only menu links in it so pdas can use the site. The way it works right now the menu doesn’t show up.
I think the point of YAMB has been slightly missed here.
I’ve been a developer for mobile and web for many years experiencing the internet converge, while mobile has fragmentmented and confused.
The good news is diversity on the web has weakened Internet Explorers dominance and forced Microsoft to do the one thing they should’ve originally focused on and that’s adhering to W3C standards! It’s standards which allow developers to focus on services that work across the board, which in turn benefits the user. Unfortunately this hasnt happened on mobile.
It’s easy to forget that mobile started with WML which wasnt even HTML at all, a nasty over simplification of HTML which very quickly died out. As handsets have offered more CPU power, better screens and more memory, we’ve seen the advent of iMode (cHTML), Pocket IE and a myriad of 3rd party vendors and in-house teams offering browsers that support xHTML MP/CSS to varying degrees.
The move from WAP 2.0 to Web on handsets is inevitable and it will almost certainly be dominated by the four main players MS, Opera, Mozilla and WebKit. This is gr8 because it means you get standards out of the box developers crave.
But there are still issues, in UK and Europe data charges are still extortionate, which cut out the majority of users who would be happy to embrace new technology. It’s a problem that’s hindered new services and has allowed network operators to corner WAP, dominating with their own portals. Other issues include data speed and cell connection issues, especially in areas outside of big cities.
But at the end of the day, one of the biggest advances still yet to be solved is compelling UI’s for input and small screen use. The iPhone has set the standard with manufactures, but there is still a long way to go here!
Firefox has no chance. They don’t have the discipline required by mobile device developing. There is no RAM to flood, there is no RAM to tell end users “upgrade”, an application can’t get stuck or it gets the boot from core OS, they have barely started to code a native looking browser for OS X, a desktop OS yet alone they will support hundreds of different browsers without the knowledge of Nokia or expertise of Opera.
These are the same people who rejected to put colorsync support to Mac OS X browser for 7 years while Apple was there, free to help. Why? Couple of developers never used colour correction and that was enough to say “it is needless feature”. If you ship something to mobile environment, you have to listen and implement every end users favourite feature. Symbian/WinCE etc. environments are full of people who can pay $30 for a “no hassle” program, there is no “It is free” excuse. They basically remove your program and purchase the non free one.
I may have issues with S60 “Webkit” browser or sometimes Opera but I choose Webkit developers or Opera Asa developers /community over Mozilla without any question.