13
Apr

Browsing on a mobile device sucks

Posted by Thom Allen

So far my biggest complaint about my mobile device is browsing the Internet. It sucks. Few if any sites detect a mobile browser but even more frustrating is that the mobile browser can’t do it for me.

I’m using the default Windows Explorer hack for Windows Mobile 5. I’m going to download a few browsers and try them out. If you can suggest something please do.

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Category : Articles / Technology

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    No kiddin Thom, mobile browsing is a total joke! There are some sites out there that do a great job detecting your mobile and giving you different css. What I've found is that most people building sites rarely think about their mobile users. Try going to phil801.com/wpblog (my tech blog) on your mobile, it'll sense it but my main site, phil801.com won't. The reason for that is I'm using Alex King's WP Mobile plugin on my blog but because I'm not a php or css programmer, I have no idea how to do that for my main site, though I would love to! I was barely able to hack together the stuff I did on my home site. My point is that unless you know how to do front end web development it's still really tricky to build your site to be mobile friendly - is yours?

    Unless I misunderstand something, it's not actually about the browser, but about the site - the css has to be different and it has to be done by something that knows what the content is, which the browser doesn't. Going naked (not rendering css) doesn't help much either. Of course, this would be solved by a lot of the symantec web goals - web 3.0 :)
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    Yeah, I know its not the browser as it is the website. So here is something that is pretty amazing to me:

    1. Alex King's plug would make just about every Wordpress site viewable on a mobile browser yet very few site implement it. I was guilty; but have since repented. I think Wordpress and other blogging software should be readable buy mobile devices by default.

    2. I don't think web designers take mobile browsing into consideration when building a site. Probably because mobile viewers are very small.

    In the end, I still find my way around, sites like Google, MSN and Yahoo! make it easy to find what I'm looking for but I still can't see most of it.

    What would be cool is if somehow Google or MSN or Yahoo! search engine could filter only sites that are mobile capable, that way I am assured the link I tap on will be readable. Now that would be cool. I need to see if that is a feature of the search engines. If not, they need that.
 
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