…Acid 3 scores range from a complete fail to 100 out of 100.

This is not consistency; it’s thinly veiled chaos.

But I’m not convinced that the situation is nearly that bad.

The data doesn’t reflect how fast the mobile market changes. The traditional difference between mobile and desktop, after all, has been that mobile is moving at all. If you figure a conservative 24 month average replacement cycle for smartphones, then the entire market for browsers turns over every two years. And that’s the historical view. An increasing percentage of smartphone owners now receive regular software updates that provide new browsers even faster. What matters then is how old the WebKit version in a particular firmware is and how prevalant that firmware is in the real world. As usual, distribution and market share are what matters in determining real-world compatibility, and if that’s a constantly changing secnario, the data should at least reflect how things are changing.

So what if we add a column to represent the vintage of the tested WebKit versions? Here’s a slightly re-formatted version of PPK’s summary data, separated by desktop/mobile and including rough WebKit vintages (corrections and new data much appreciated if you happen to know!):

Desktop

Mobile

PPKs data is missing some other columns too, namely a rough estimate of the percent of mobile handsets running a particular version, rates of change in that landscape over the past 18 months, and whether or not these browsers are on the whole better than the deployed fleet of desktop browsers. Considering that web devs today still can’t target everything in Acid2, knowing how the mobile world compares to desktops will provide some much-needed context for these valuable tables. Perhaps those are things that we as a community can chip in to help provide.

Even without all of that, just adding the rough vintages adds an arc to the story; one that’s not nearly so glum and dreary. What we can see is that newer versions of WebKit are much more capable and compatible, even at the edges. None of PPK’s data yet tests where the baseline is, so remember that the numbers presented mostly describe new-ish features on the platform. We also see clearly that the constraints of the mobile environment force some compromises vs. desktop browsers of the same lineage. This is all in line with what I’d expect from a world where:

• WebKit is becoming the dominant smartphone rendering engine, finding its way into myriad devices due to its performance, compatibility with web content, clean C++ codebase, and straightforward API
• Vendors upgrade the version of WebKit they ship when they release new OS versions. Very few mobile devices enjoy long-term OTA updates (yet).
• Deployed smartphone stock turns over every 2 years

The important takeaway for web developers in all of this is that WebKit is winning and that that is a good thing. The dynamics of the marketplace have thus far ensured that we don’t get “stuck” the way we did on the desktop. That is real progress.

Where do we go from here? Given that the mobile marketplace is changing at a rate that’s nearly unheard of on the desktop, I think that when new charts and comparisons are made, we’ll need to couch them in terms of “how does this affect the difference in capabilities across the deployed base”, rather than simply looking at instantaneous features. Mobile users are at once more likely tied to their OSes choice of browser and more likely to get a better browser sooner. That combination defies how we think about desktop browsers, so we’ll need to add more context to get a reasonable view of the mobile world.

Awww yeah.

Thanks, as always, go to Chrome’s good friends over at Apple and WebKit who are doing amazing work to help deliver a more beautiful web.

Apple

iPhone, Safari

Google

Android, Chrome

Nokia

Series 60 browser

Plam

WebOS

Adobe

AIR web runtime

From deep integration with the platform to being the platform, WebKit in various forms is how nearly every credible smartphone now “does” the web. The major outliers here are the WinCE devices, Blackberry, and whatever Sony’s doing this week, but the writing is on the wall for them too. Mobile IE is a joke and the Blackberry succeeds in spite of its web experience. iPhone, Android, and Pre have raised the bar. The sucky-web center will not hold.

For a sizable chunk of the mobile browsers that a web developer would like to target today, that means that WebKit == Mobile. As predicted, the mobile world has beaten the desktop to the web of the future. It doesn’t hurt that WebKit is making deep inroads into the desktop, either….but then you could reasonably assume that they pay me to say that.

So what does a WebKit-only world look like? And how portable are our desktop-web skills and tools? I did a quick set of experiments this past weekend to see how much of Dojo you’d still need and what we could leave behind. The results are encouraging. The headline numbers for dojo.js are roughly:

You can grab a copy of this pre-1.3.0 version here (webkitMobile.dojo.js).

The big size wins (in decreasing order) were:

1. Moving to a QSA-only version of dojo.query()
2. Being able to use intrinsics for dojo.forEach, etc.
3. Dropping IE and FF-specific rendering, XHR, and style hacks
4. Using a common closure wrapper for the entire core

And there’s even more fruit on the vine. I think without too much more work I’ll be able to drop the current animation system in favor of pure CSS animations and can significantly simplify the XHR code which doesn’t do the straightforward thing to avoid terrible memory leaks on IE and very old versions of FF.

All of this points to where we could be if the browsers just got collectively awesome all of a sudden. That’s the good news. The downside is that still leaves a lot of janktastic spec mistakes to be worked around at nearly every level of the platform. This experiment suggests that there is still a price to be paid just to get the platform to a usable state. If we look at the APIs of Dojo, Prototype, or jQuery as a set of suggestions for the APIs that the web should expose, then it becomes pretty clear that we’ve still got a long long way to go. But we can do at least 30% better in the short run, and I’m very glad of that.

My friends over at SitePen beat me to the punch on my own patches, but that’s how it goes sometimes. Props to them for that.

So what does Chrome mean for those of us who aren’t breaking out the champagne? Well, first, it’s the second sign (after Gears and YBP (har!)) that the content authors are taking back the web from the “browser guys”. I’ve been fascinated for the last 6 months or so by the strategic mis-alignment which results when both the browsing and authoring experience in the hands of organizations only care about one but not the other. Mozilla gets paid by search-box revenue and users download it because it’s better for browsing, therefore Mozilla is incented to build new ways to browse, but their investments in content are somewhat mis-aligned (and, frankly, it shows). Google and Yahoo, on the other hand, are critically dependent on the content getting better, so they produce plugins to augment HTML in un-intrusive ways. Chrome crosses over into the browser business from the perspective of content, and it also shows, albeit in a good-ish way. I guess we’ll need to wait and see how browsing-oriented Chrome gets (e.g., will it sprout an extensions platform – ala Firefox – or will the propsect of an ad-blocking plugin for the Google browser make that proposal D.O.A.?).

Regardless of how Chrome evolves as a product, the important question now is: how will it be distributed? The obviously non-evil thing to do is to say “look, it’s great, it’s free” and hope that the world discovers it on its own thanks to word-of-mouth and/or leverage of the Google brand. Given that Chrome delivers new awesome things which are end-user-visible (some “end-user-awesome”, if you will), there’s some real chance that Chrome can get to roughly Firefox level market-share without breaking too much of a sweat. Not that Firefox’s market share is anything to really covet, given that MoFo/MoCo have been toiling at it for a decade now. To get real, honest-to-god leverage out of this process, Chrome is going to need something like 60+% market share, and that means changing ingrained user habits. I put the probability of that happening without distribution channel love at roughly bupkis.

Microsoft killed Netscape by bundling the browser with the OS. Apple is making inroads by bundling. Firefox is even getting aggressive. So where does this leave “don’t be evil”? Given the toolbar promotional deals which Google has cut in the past, I think there’s some organizational capacity inside the Goog to use the distribution channels they’ve already created as a way of getting to critical mass. What I don’t see, though, is a view of how to bring the mission of Gears into alignment with Chrome (or vice versa). They’re both important, but Chrome is a long-term bet while Gears is the near-future solution. They are not in opposition, but their strategies for gaining leverage over the problems facing content authors are very different.

We need what Gears can offer to every browser right now while Chrome dukes it out for market share on the browsing experience merits. Hopefully, if nothing else, the Chrome installer will add Gears to other browsers on the system that users install Chrome to. Even if they don’t pick the googly experience for browsing day-to-day, perhaps Chrome can still serve to give new tools to the content-author side of the house. Other browser vendors won’t do such a thing since they win or loose on an exclusive “I must replace the other guy” basis. Here, Google (and by “Google”, I mean “the open web”) wins either way. Hopefully Google’s interest in making the content experience better trumps the “we’re all browser guys now” instinct in this case.

We’ll find out tomorrow, I guess. Here’s to hoping.