Palm webOS

Mobile Web Challenges

The challenge for client OS providers is far greater than simply delivering a fast, fully featured web browser on a phone. The classic web browser navigation model works poorly on a phone (in fact, some would argue that it’s poor even on a desktop computer).

Mobile users are, well, mobile. They are usually in motion, walking, driving, or occupied with something other than their phones. Launching a browser each time you want something on the Web—wading through multiple pages to get to the right spot—is tedious, distracting, and slow.

Web pages have their own UI models, with navigation and controls separate from and frequently inferior to those of the device they are displayed on. Often, the only option is to walk links. Menus, selectors, text editors, and other UI tools that enable rapid user interaction in native applications on the same device can’t be used within the web browser. Launching web pages from bookmarks or moving between web pages usually involves a completely separate UI model from that used to launch native applications and generally requires invoking the browser before anything else, adding at least one extra step to most actions.

In addition, web users are forced to initiate all interactions. They must make a request and wait for it to be fulfilled. It is clearly more effective for applications to monitor external events and prompt the user only when something of interest occurs. Ajax and web applications have made a big improvement by handling ...