New mobile browsers bringing real Web to handhelds

Trade-offs and frustrations

For developers the advent of such browsers can bring constant and frustrating trade-offs between industry standards and vendor innovations and extensions. "The iPhone has a whole slough of iPhone-specific Cascading Style Sheet extensions, which let you do things that you can't do with CSS on other browsers," says Grigsby. ThunderHawk makes use of Bitstream's patented font technology, substituting its own fonts and creating several magnification levels to increase the legibility of text on mobile screens.

"More standardization is needed," Grigsby says.

The W3C's Mobile Web Initiative has created a set of best practices for optimizing Web site design to improve browsing for mobile users. It's expected to become a formal W3C recommendation in the next two months, says Matt Womer

But there's a limit to standardization. Browsing on a given mobile device is highly individualized by the device capabilities, the browser design decisions, and the user's interaction with both. Every vendor in this article displays a full Web page on a phone screen. But after that, how you work with it can vary widely.

The iPhone's touch interface clearly has made browsing easy for users but it's just as clearly a high-end phone. Mozilla's Mobile Firefox project is crafting both a touch and a nontouch user interface.

Bitstream's ThunderHawk shows at the top of the screen what the company calls a "minimap" of the entire Web page, outlining the section of the page being viewed by the user, with clickable "hotspots" to other parts of the page. The minimap is an aid to navigating the full page quickly.

Opera Mobile 9.5 borrows from Opera Mini to now show a full Web page, then let users pan and zoom to find and focus on specific areas. A grayed-out upside down "V" on the bottom right of the screen gives one-click access to an overlay page of standard browser buttons and actions.

It all adds up to new opportunities, and new headaches. "The browser wars are back and this time the battlefield is mobile," says Grigsby.