March 2013
Intermediate to advanced
774 pages
20h 36m
English
Content preview from Programming the Mobile Web, 2nd EditionBecome 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,
O’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.I 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.I’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.I'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.
Chapter 3. Browsers and Web Platforms
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 or platform 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 Google Chrome, Internet Explorer, Firefox, Safari, and Opera. 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-end and mid-range 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, Windows Phone, Symbian, and Android (up to 4.0) are upgraded when you update the operating system firmware.
To complicate the situation, almost every device on the market allows users to add an alternative web browser, and some carriers, like Vodafone in Europe, include a copy of an alternative ...
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I'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.