theregoesdave

When looking at the state of the Mobile Web today, it’s invigorating to see so many companies in recent history that are creating mobile interfaces to their services. Many of the major portals have redesigned their mobile sites to include more rich content than just simple lines of text. The major social sites have nearly all developed both a mobile WAP interface and one specifically for the iPhone’s Mobile Safari browser.

Wait a minute… major companies are designing two mobile web interfaces?

To me, while it’s great to see designers rethinking usability in the mobile web, the fact that developers need to create separate mobile interfaces based on the browser specification is outlandish. Can you imagine if developers needed to create a different version of their site for each desktop browser? Granted, each major browser has some idiosyncrasies, but this is *supposed* to be where standards come in. The fact that sites like Facebook and Linkedin have released both mobile and iPhone interfaces seems like a step in the wrong direction.

This problem looks to be getting worse before it can start to get better. For the near future, the iPhone will go on supporting AJAX and not Flash. Pocket IE is moving quickly to support Flash, but seems disinterested in enabling full the javascript support needed for Rich Internet Applications using AJAX for their mobile browser. With these two industry behemoths seemingly tugging web users in opposite directions, where is the relief? Opera Mobile seems to be making great strides in usability, but has neither full javascript support nor Flash support, though they have created a plugin-based architecture that might make integrating Flash much easier.

So where is the silver lining in all of this storm of change coming to the mobile web?

• The increase in mobile web users and traffic is encouraging companies to invest in developing mobile UIs. Unfortunately we’re still somewhat in the phase that something is better than nothing.
• As more companies are thinking about and deploying a mobile UI, they can begin to call for standards from the developers of each browser.
• As the capabilities of the mobile web browsers increase, companies will have more options in which tools they can use to create rich mobile applications.

It’s very possible that Apple and Microsoft will continue pulling the mobile web user and browser market in different directions for another year or so. By then Adobe will hopefully have created plugins for Mobile Safari and Opera Mobile. In the meantime Opera Mobile will hopefully continue their work to support javascript and AJAX. So the choice rests on Microsoft’s shoulders yet again- invest in supporting the full range of web standards or continue losing market share to Apple and the open source community first to Firefox on the desktop and now to Opera Mobile.

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• Full Flash comes to Windows Mobile
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