Infrequently Noted

Sorry to be the bringer of bad news but the iPhone does not cache components larger than 25KB.

http://yuiblog.com/blog/2008/02/06/iphone-cacheability/

This is after unzipping. Which is a shame.

So to get really good performance on that platform you need to break your files up into 25KB chunks.

Hey Dean:

So yes, we know all about that problem too. I've got something in the works for that as well.

All is not lost = )

Regards

I ought to note Opera Mini, which has more installed phones than any other browser. However, they're not smartphones. One interesting question is whether it's worth catering to non-smartphone mobile browsers; Opera Mini is pretty good for the limited environment it's used in (I use it all the time on my non-smartphone phone), but other non-smartphone browsers are horrid. There are way, way more of them than smartphones, though; "the mobile web" is actually two separate mobile webs, a high-end one (which as you note is almost all WebKit) and a low-end one (which won't do most of the niceness that Dojo can provide anyway, so it doesn't get the progressive enhancements).

You'd be surprised at how good Opera Mini is. There is also Fennec to consider -- a mobile version of Firefox. I'm making my money building mobile sites at the moment. I'm not betting my living on webkit just yet.

That said, I'm happy to use Ajax for Opera mobile but not CSS-based animations. There is some kind of weird re-rendering for Opera that screws with your JS.

PS. Anyone who says that you can build a mobile site just by changing your style sheets is crazy.

Alex: yeah, the smartphone/non-smartphone split seems a reasonable one to me, and smartphones are overwhelmingly WebKit or mobile IE.

Dean: Opera Mini's great, but you can't really make it do interesting interactive stuff quite yet (although I admit I had to fall back to OM3 because OM4 doesn't work right on my phone). I did ping the OM guys to say: is it possible to do iUI-style effects? Apparently all this sort of stuff is going to be possible in OM5, hopefully, which will probably bring OM5 up to par with mobile WebKit. That's going to be a good day, then, because you can have smartphone-quality web browsing on any arbitrary phone. A pleasing day.

I'd like to see Fennec take off, but I suspect it'll be a while before it gets close enough to be viable, and by then WebKit may have eaten its lunch entirely in the mobile world. I hope not; I like Fennec (the little amount I've played with it) and Mozilla-based browsers have always had the most advanced JS support.

Hey Stuart:

In this experiment, I've taken the position that non-smartphone browsers will usually get the "degraded" page (i.e., no scripting). Even as they pick up better and better CSS, those browsers really do kind of trail browser progress by a generation or so. That kind of split makes a lot of sense to how I think about building apps and I think that if you say "there's webkit and there's everyone else", you can do a relatively good job of delivering the right experience to each. It's one of those places where "progressive enhancement" isn't so much a mantra or design philosophy as it is a high-functioning coping mechanism for folks who won't build a site twice...which is most of us.

Regards

quote: "PLAM? A new player in town!? Heh."

You have a "rendering problem"!

Are you using WebKit? ;-(

>> The major outliers here are the WinCE devices, Blackberry, and whatever Sony’s doing this week ...

The browser on the latest BlackBerrys (i.e. Storm and I think even Bold) are using WebKit (with a much improved experience, I might add).

> but then you could reasonably assume that they pay me to say that.

No, they pay me to say that. They pay you to make it true. :)

Stuart, yeah that's my point about Opera Mini. iUI style animations don't really work. Ajax is fine so you can have some dynamic effects. But overall, it's not worth it. CSS support is good but not as good as webkit.

Mobile is new territory. There is an early leader but it's still all about standards support in the long run. If Opera Mini worked just like its big brother then I'd take it more seriously. That's not too far away.

On the Windows CE front http://torchmobile.com/ has a WebKit browser you can download.

PLAM? A new player in town!? Heh.

Why is it WebKit Mobile and not just Webkit.dojo?

Is there some tradeoff that means this would reduce performance/functionality for Chrome, Safari etc.? Or would any performance increase be effectively unmeasurable on a proper desktop machine?

Dave:

A fair question. Turns out that what's good for mobile is good for Chrome and Safari too! All of the optimizations in this version are applicable to desktop webkit-based browsers. If you know you're going to be targeting Safari/AIR/Chrome, then this is also the version of dojo.js you might want to be using. If nothing else, it'll boot up faster due to the reduced parse time.

Regards

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