Symbian in Motion

S60 Browser Issues, Part 2

by Zach at 6:52 pm | July 24th, 2008 | Category: Web

Apparently some people were a bit confused by my last post entitled The S60 Browser Just Doesn’t Cut it Anymore. Despite my post-publishing addition, several people thought that my qualm was with a particular site that continuously caused the S60 Browser to crash. To clarify, it’s not.

My qualm is the fact that the S60 Browser does not keep up with internet technology. Of course, it’s “just” a mobile browser so I would never expect it to be able to handle cutting edge elements and overly complex code. Websites built on technologies that have been popular for five years or more however, should be accommodated. This is my opinion. Nokia / S60 innovated by bringing “the real web” to the mobile phone masses, this is true. The problem is they left too much of it behind. At the risk of sounding like a broken record, I visit several site each week that don’t work properly in the S60 Browser; sites that really should work.

So just now, I picked another site. I thought to myself, “Ok. I want to try a popular site, also built on Drupal, that doesn’t do anything too fancy.” The first site that popped in my head was NowPublic. Here are the results:

What’s my point? My point is that this should be a huge focus right now for S60. In case you haven’t noticed, the web is big business. People spend more time on the internet now than ever before and a new popular web service seems to pop up every 15 seconds. It’s staggering! The S60 Browser on the other hand, now supports Flash.

Mobile browsers will never keep up with desktop browsers

Of course this is true. Does that mean we should be content having a browser that is 10 years behind the curve? No.

Android, as little as I care about it right now, is going to be interesting in this regard. A truly open mobile platform built by a real Internet Company. Quite intriguing indeed…

Viewing 8 Comments

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    I agree with you man, S60 did bring the internet into our hands where ever we are and we are all greatfull for that but it really is time to move on i mean now that there are other mobile web browsers which can handle more things just fine (should i say iphone? i maybe i'll just give a opera example as the iphone seems hated around here...not that i'm a supporter i just don wanna favor anything) but my point is that when S60 did innovate internet we were like yea its ok for the finner details to be in the fix but now that its time to move on they have no excuse.....this is a good post man, it really should be addressed by nokia....Nice Zach
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    ok one question.
    do you prefer flash support? .. or better compatibality with web 2.0? :D
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    Better compatibility, no question. I don't need to watch videos of
    cats falling asleep, I need to browse the web.

    ;)
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    What's strange is that I tried nowpublic.com on my E61i and I could see both sets of columns and scroll through them no problem...
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    Very odd indeed Jason - perhaps there have been some "improvements"
    made to the S60 Browser since the latest E61i firmware release. ;)
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    just tryed nowpublic on my n95 8gb euro and the same happened. iv had alot of problems with the browser its time for an upgrade but thats not going to happen any time soon and nokias ment to be an internet company aswell yeah right.
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    It's great Zach that you are addressing this issue! Nokia dev guys should read this blog. Hats off to s60 to take the leap, but it seems like the browser has been left to rot. This is a shame! Nokia should allocate resources to this rather than making a new chat application that nobody will use (because there are soooo many other better ones to choose from), or waste money on making a music store that is also already exists. All these side ventures are in the wrong direction.
    Many greater minds than mine predicted that all IT will be done on the Internet not to far in the future. I have to agree fully. Just from personal experience - the company I work for uses Google for everything from company mail to online document editing cooperation, communication via chat, the list is never ending. Really from the applications on my laptop I use Firefox for most of what I need to do.
    So keeping that in mind I would assume the browser on a mobile device would be number 1 priority in this day and age. I assume people at Nokia are not stupid and see this trend going towards everything being online. So why don't they do something about it???
    Firefox is coming out in mobile for soon (the sooner the better) and that hopefully will solve some of the problems, I'm really waiting for it, becouse right now surfing the web on my E51 is such a put-off that I only do it when I really must.
    Zach you mentioned Android... well all I have to say is line up with your plates because Android is gonna dish out some ass whoopin, that the mobile market has never seen before ;)
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    nowpublic.com seems to open a huge popup in middle of the screen when first time opened. This popup is bigger than the phones display resolution, so it just doesn't fit the screen. There are always these kind of use cases when using small screen rendering, not all the web sites were tested that they work on small windows also. There is always going to be limitations on mobile browsing when compared to PC experience, for example this small srceen rendering, and also the fact the mouse cannot be fully emulated with 5-way navigation joystick, not to talk about emulating mouse usage on touch screen devices (how would you emulate e.g. onmouseup or onmouseover events with touch)

    Its a fact that S60 uses a bit outdated version of safari engine, but iPhone uses cutting edge version of it as far as I know and still theres more and more iPhone optimized versions of web sites coming out. Something to think about... It's not just about the web engine, mobile devices have _real_ limitations that cannot be solved without using external monitor and mouse attached to the phone, and then it's not a phone anymore, it's a PC

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