Skip to Content
Programming the Mobile Web
book

Programming the Mobile Web

by Maximiliano Firtman
July 2010
Intermediate to advanced
510 pages
13h 31m
English
O'Reilly Media, Inc.
Content preview from Programming the Mobile Web

Chapter 2. Mobile Browsing

Understanding the big picture about platforms, operating systems, brands, and models is important for getting started in the mobile market, but the most important information for us will be which mobile browser is used. Browsers will guide the rest of this book and most of our work as mobile web developers.

Many web developers curse desktop browsers and compatibility issues between them. Maybe you are one of them. But compared with the mobile world, in the desktop world the browser war is really simple: we have Internet Explorer (6, 7, 8, or newer), Firefox, Safari, Opera, and Chrome. And that’s about it. In the mobile world, there are more than 5,000 devices on the market. The good news (compared with this number) is that there are fewer than 25 mobile browsers in common usage—every smartphone OS has its own mobile browser, but the proprietary operating systems for the low- and mid-end devices mostly use similar browsers. Still, the situation is far more complex than in the desktop world!

All mobile devices come with one preinstalled mobile browser, and very few of them can be upgraded or uninstalled. There are some exceptions: the browsers included with iOS, webOS, and Android are automatically upgraded when you update the operating system firmware. This can also be done in other operating systems, like Symbian or Windows Mobile, but up to now it’s not an operation that users do frequently.

To complicate the situation, almost every device on the market ...

Become an O’Reilly member and get unlimited access to this title plus top books and audiobooks from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers, thousands of courses curated by job role, 150+ live events each month,
and much more.

Read now

Unlock full access

More than 5,000 organizations count on O’Reilly

AirBnbBlueOriginElectronic ArtsHomeDepotNasdaqRakutenTata Consultancy Services

QuotationMarkO’Reilly covers everything we've got, with content to help us build a world-class technology community, upgrade the capabilities and competencies of our teams, and improve overall team performance as well as their engagement.
Julian F.
Head of Cybersecurity
QuotationMarkI wanted to learn C and C++, but it didn't click for me until I picked up an O'Reilly book. When I went on the O’Reilly platform, I was astonished to find all the books there, plus live events and sandboxes so you could play around with the technology.
Addison B.
Field Engineer
QuotationMarkI’ve been on the O’Reilly platform for more than eight years. I use a couple of learning platforms, but I'm on O'Reilly more than anybody else. When you're there, you start learning. I'm never disappointed.
Amir M.
Data Platform Tech Lead
QuotationMarkI'm always learning. So when I got on to O'Reilly, I was like a kid in a candy store. There are playlists. There are answers. There's on-demand training. It's worth its weight in gold, in terms of what it allows me to do.
Mark W.
Embedded Software Engineer

You might also like

Mobile Web High Performance

Mobile Web High Performance

Maximiliano Firtman
Ajax Security

Ajax Security

Billy Hoffman, Bryan Sullivan

Publisher Resources

ISBN: 9780596807818Errata Page