Interesting theory, backed up by data, to explain the difference between Android device sales and browser usage share. “The stock Android browser in previous versions reportedly had problems rendering non-mobile optimized web-pages, leading to lower usage. If a user realized that certain webpages were improperly rendered on a mobile device, it would obviously lead to a drop in future browsing sessions from that device. Meanwhile, on Android 4.0, as consumers have realized that the browsing experience is more “desktop-like”, it has led to an increase in browser usage.”
There’s a few other bits of note: screen size & aspect ratio. Honestly, webpages are still designed like print, portrait view.
My wife’s iPad2 renders webpages wonderfully. And she uses it for web-browsing more than me. She also isn’t into RSS feeds either. My 7″ CM10 android is much more suited to RSS & re-rendering engines like Instapaper.. and that’s what I use it for. It’s painful to do any form submissions on the small screen.
It’s an interesting theory but a stronger factor is most likely the demographic of the average Android user vs an iOS user. This strongly correlated with other areas such as money spent on applications or accessories.
Edited 2012-12-03 18:06 UTC
what?? seriously, what??
(well, at least he didn’t use a car analogy)
On Android users have an option of Firefox which is superior to the default browser. Actually it’s available there for quite a while, but not everyone knows about it.
Edited 2012-12-03 18:16 UTC
And lets not forget Opera Mini! I have used it almost exclusively on my phones since 2003.
Me too! I’ve used it since it came available for WM6 and I’m using it now on my iPhone.
Long live Opera Mini!
By the way… one thing not many people notice is that Opera works really really well on places where you loose your connection all the time, such as on a train.
So next time you guys are stuck on a train, give Opera Mini a try!
That’s quite a feat, considering Opera Mini launched in 2005-2006
( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opera_Mini#History )
Back in 2003, you probably used Opera Mobile – which is a separate thing.
Well, to be fair, Firefox on Android has *SUCKED*, in so many ways, until very recently. Anyone trying to say it doesn’t either has a skookum SoC, or hasn’t really used Firefox until recently.
Trying to use Firefox prior to Sept 2012 on a 1 GHz single-core SoC was frustrating, and then some.
Yeah, those old foxes where kinda meh, but these latest releases really fly even on the crappiest hardware (including sub $60 Chinnese tablets).
Once the open source flash support is added we can finally root-uninstall the stock browser + chrome and live ever happy after
Don’t even get me started on Firefox Mobile.
Even if the browser was okay, All the mobile browsers that aren’t Webkit render pages badly because a most developers use the -webkit extensions.
Edited 2012-12-03 20:22 UTC
It’s the problem of illiterate developers, not the problem of browsers. Back in the day many sites were IE only either. That changed, thanks to Firefox to a big degree.
Edited 2012-12-03 21:33 UTC
Not really IMHO. Two reasons:
* Yet again whoever allowed vendor specific extensions made a massive mistake, they assumed that web developers would adhere to recommendation (not many do, which is ignoring the reality of the situation … they took an idealistic and not pragmatic view). At some point they could have made a line in the sand … but they didn’t have the balls.
* Companies only care about the top X% support, Webkit was there first, was ahead of the game and it was abused because people have mouths to feed.
I could go on about this .. as this is my trade.
But IE was soo damn superior at the time compared to the competition and there were no real standards in place (much like today) there was little point taking anything else seriously.
You can rage all your want about that, but at the time standards supports was a joke and the only browser that came near to it was IE.
IE didn’t try to focus on standards, it tried to hijack them. Luckily it failed. I don’t think Webkit tries to hijack standards like IE did, but custom extensions obviously complicate things. The situation improves with time though.
No, it did try to focus on standards. IE 8 was the first browser that implemented XHTML 1.1 and CSS 2.1 correctly. (Firefox 2 BTW came out at the same time as IE8 and that supported far fewer web standards and has far more bugs).
IE 6 was working against a draft standard at the time and said draft standard was changed after its release and they Microsoft couldn’t change it because they promised to support it for as long as they have.
The equivalent browser at the time was Netscape … and that didn’t give f–k about standards.
Also recently, Microsoft have actually been speaking to the web developers on why they don’t always support the latest stuff.
This is what I said about it:
http://luke-robbins.co.uk/internet-explorer-and-why-they-are-behind…
Here is the original video:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GvtHb6tBx6Y
The long of the short of it is, that IE is used by the Enterprise and Enterprise customers expect a certain set of features to be support to browser EOL. If they get include standards that aren’t finalised they find themselves forever supporting an incorrect standard (see IE6 comment I made above).
No it won’t improve with time, because other browser that aren’t webkit based are being forced to support the -webkit extensions on mobile.
Webkit it the IE6 of the Mobile browsers.
Edited 2012-12-03 23:15 UTC
You sure that you got the dates right?
IE8 released 2009, while FF2 is 2006.
That’s the point. Any kind of interest for standards in IE was shown only when Firefox started seriously taking away IE market share. Before that, when IE was too dominating, MS didn’t care about standards whatsoever.
FFS.
I just told you why you were totally wrong about IE6 and Firefox wasn’t anywhere near standards compliant til about 2009 (YES I got my versions wrong with Firefox it was 3.5/3.6 rather than 2).
Also standards compliant is a bit of a misnomer anyway because every single browser has bugs, I can go through the multitude of them that existed with Chrome (which was very similar to hasLayout in IE6).
But hey lets make up history to suit my belief that Microsoft are pure evil.
We don’t have to make up anything….
Then please tell me why when explained to you the actual situation you guys put your fingers in your ears going “na na na I can’t hear you” and then continue with the diatribe.
There is a lot of shitty things that IE does (the inspector tool is still utter shite), but most people usually complain about the wrong bloody things.
Back then we had IE6-devs, now we have MBP-devs…
A (way too expensive) webdev agency created a new “modern” web page for a business I know. It turns out that new site renders correctly only on MBP-retina and Safari. Guess what their response was when I complained that it looked like shit on a standard 1366×768 PC laptop…
Not surprised in the least.
Works on my machine is an unfortunate reality.