Surfing against the waves...

Mobile web browsing has always been a "second best" experience up until now. And in fact when I am saying second best, I don't mean it in the Carl Lewis vs. Ben Johnson way, but rather in the Carl Lewis vs. a three-legged turtle: slow, lame and has a hard shell... (BTW - To fully appreciate this analogy you have to know that a shell is also another name for a user interface - really, look it up here!).

There are two approaches to mobile browsing. One says that since devices are getting more sophisticated and can support more elaborate operating systems and also have bigger screens (not to mention the great bandwidth of 3G networks and up), it is just a matter of time until mobile phones will have browsers that don't require any special treatment of the web on the mobile. The other approach says that mobile browsing will always stay a different experience and as such, will need special treatment and solutions.

If you read my blog regularly, you probably know that I think that the latter is more accurate. Sure, the first approach holds an amazing promise with it: No need to change content, everything that is on the web, is on the mobile: regular HTML pages, Dynamic HTML, Java Applets, Flash applications, ActiveX controls, the whole "gang"... Also, no need for resizing and reformatting due to different resolutions.

This dream would of course be the nightmare of companies that are trying to bridge the current gap between the web and the mobile web. These include transcoding solutions, mobile browsers vendors and even current J2ME applications and games.

However, the reality of things makes this dream stay in the fantasy realm. One of the most major trends in the web world today is transferring logic from the server side to the client side, thus making the browser work much harder and become not as thin as it was several years ago. Current web applications use AJAX that usually (or more accurately always) involve sophisticated JavaScript intended to emulate desktop applications behavior as the past passive web applications. Many of those application don't work on older browsers (BTW - Internet Explorer 6.0 is getting old real fast nowadays...)

This means that not only mobile devices have to catch up with all the technologies I mentioned before, but they also face the challenge of keeping up with desktop web technologies that as it seems now will keep pushing more and more logic to the client side. And not to forget the device fragmentation problem: In order for us to be able to serve mobile web content as regular web content - ALL devices from ALL major vendors have to adopt this approach and implement it, since if you have to do something special for one, and another special thing for another - you have transcoding issues in your hands...

Another major factor is screen sizes, that as I mentioned before won't get substantially bigger. As far as I know the highest resolution that is convenient to watch on a 2+ inch screen is about 480x640 (Not really widely available on the market - but I saw it in last year's 3GSM). Even this resolution which is considered to be great for mobile phones, is not that good for web: Today many sites have ceased to support 800x600 since most users use 1024x768 and up. So if you bump into a site that doesn't handle lower resolution you would have to scroll horizontally, which is no picnic, especially with a handset...

So, it seems that we still have to be creative regarding mobile web. Today's array of solution include specialized mobile browsers, server-side transcoding both for images and for the text/HTML itself (That is also a problem - different devices treat several HTML tags differently). Also, J2ME applications cover the gap when a better experience is sought after (For example Google's Gmail mobile application).

Anyway, it seems to me that between the ideal, almost Utopian approach and the current day solutions, there is a lot of margin for new and exciting developments, and in fact I am inspecting one myself these days. Anyone else?...

P.S. - No turtles were harmed during the writing of this post...