1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
17
18
19
20
21
22
23
24
25
26
27
28
29
|
Facebook, Netvibes and Meebo all launched new iPhone-optimized versions of their sites this week and all three of them are very nice, but wasn't one of the points of the iPhone that it offered "a real web browser?" So why all the iPhone optimized sites? And why iPhone, why not just "mobile optimized?"
The iPhone is Internet Explorer 4 all over again.
Inflammatory I know, but I'm not the first person to suggest at much. Last month Scott McNulty over at The Unofficial Apple Weblog <a href="http://www.tuaw.com/2007/07/18/the-strange-case-of-made-for-iphone-websites/">floated the same idea</a> and commenters here on Compiler have said as much as well.
At the time I would have argued that most the iPhone sites were actually "applications" given that websites are essentially the only SDK software developers have for the iPhone (if you'd like to see why web-apps as iPhone apps are less then ideal, have a look at <a href="http://furbo.org/2007/08/15/benchmarking-in-your-pants/">these benchmarks</a>).
But none of the sites announced this week are "applications" exactly. They offer the same content as the normal sites, just optimized for the iPhone.
And the more I've been thinking about that argument the more I realize that that's exactly how Microsoft spun the proprietary, non-standard HTML features in IE 4.
In suggesting that developers use the web to build iPhone applications, what Apple has done (perhaps inadvertently, perhaps not) is force the creation of a subset of the mobile web that only works with the iPhone's unique features -- namely the touch-screen interface.
So how about the argument that the EDGE network requires a slimmed down site? Okay, true EDGE lags, but all mobile sites are optimized for speed, even 3G networks aren't that spectacularly fast.
Ironically, some of the best performing, easy-to-use sites on a mobile device are the very 1998-looking sites that just display content in a long list. But obviously desktop users don't want the web to revert to 1998, which is why designers find themselves caught in the middle and forced to design two separate sites -- one mobile, one normal.
Which was working until the iPhone came along and created a 3rd space -- iPhone-optimized sites.
The iPhone has created a division in the mobile-optimized web which is eerily similar to the days of IE 4 when many sites simply didn't work in Netscape.
Imagine for a minute if Microsoft had put out a Zune phone and encouraged developers to subdivide the mobile web into those sites that worked with the Zune phone, and then everything else. I can almost hear the deafening roar of protest from the blogosphere... But for some reason designers aren't decrying Apple's device-specific optimization the way the once decried browser specific optimization.
In essence Apple has forced a third tier of websites on the world by failing to provide developers with an alternative means of creating applications on the iPhone.
But while that may explain the explosion of iPhone-only sites it doesn't justify them.
Perhaps this is merely the mobile web stumbling through the same painful growth steps that the world wide web once went through (have we learned nothing?), the difference is this time the "cool" company is leading the way and no one is complaining.
|
