I surely wasn't suggesting that nobody will ever browse from a mobile. Just that it will remain small potatoes relative to non-mobile for quite some times, especially in terms of profit.
Mobile browsing is awful enough that I avoid it as much as possible. There's a few sites I trust or need that I use (wikipedia, a couple of news sites, train time tables), but otherwise I restrict my web browsing to the laptop.
It wouldn't need to be so, but as long as browsing on my phone makes me angry and frustrated, there's no point in engaging the Internet on my phone. I'll just use my phone was what it was intended for: reading ebooks.
Any phone's browser(s) should be capable of displaying the regular non-mobile site. I assume the author is referring to the iPhone specific/enhanced sites out there.
I do most of my browsing on my desktop. On mobile, it's usually really light stuff like searching up a restaurant or store, reading HN or some other silly little thing. Occasionally I see ads which are annoying, but most of these things don't have many ads anyways, so its not a big deal.
> Also on the iPad why would you want a crippled "mobile version" of a website, when the device is capable of displaying a normal website?
Apparently, the device is not capable of presenting a normal web site properly. In this case, the limitation is a little ironic. The original MacOS menu system, which required click-and-hold and used a single mouse button, was an excellent example of giving the user feedback as they navigate a system. Use of hover effects on interactive elements on web pages has a similar purpose.
The linked blog post suggests that the end of this story is the demise of :hover. There is at least one possible alternative ending: it turns out that mobile browsing on devices with small screens and automatically reformatted pages, with limited interaction possibilities and no support for widely used technologies, simply isn't as useful as having a fully capable browser on a fully capable device.
Mobile browsing has a lot of potential, but no-one says that current generation of smartphones is the best way to do it. The iPhone is still a relatively new product, Android is even newer, and despite all the hype these still represent only a relatively small share of the smartphone market between them. Analysts have started to question Apple's closed infrastructure and whether it will stand up to competition as the market develops [1]. Maybe in a year or two we will wonder what possessed anyone to think that trying to have a mobile phone and a browser on the same device was a good idea. Time will tell...
OK - you're right. I should clarify what I meant, I guess. The point I was trying to make (and doing a poor job of it) was to re-define "Mobile Web." I.e., it no longer means tiny, content-less web sites. Instead, it means the information itself, not necessarily the presentation, is applicable to the context of a mobile device.
You're absolutely correct to say that there are sites which will be useful on a mobile device, like Wikipedia or IMDB or whatever. But the web is like one of those Ven Diagrams where there are sites that are mostly applicable to PCs, sites which are mostly applicable to mobile sites, and a large area of overlap. The area that's mobile-directed is comprised of what I was speaking of (location aware stuff, remote checkins, etc), and what defines that area is not how the information presented, but what is presented.
I don't really agree with the mobile browsing. I guess it helps avoid getting sucked in but it also dramatically lowers your rate of intake if you want to read all articles from a given blog or subject.
reply