iPhone/Safari is the Mosaic of the Mobile Web
Really old folks like me remember a time before the web. And then a time when the web was an interesting technology. And then Mosaic, the browser which by virtue of (many people would argue) incorporating inline images in web pages kickstarted the web.
I think that in the wake of today’s announcements from Apple, the iPhone will be the equivalent of Mosaic for the mobile web.
Many web developers have been waiting a long time for the fabled mobile web to arrive. From WAP 1.0, we’ve been anticipating the web we can take everywhere, on mobile phones and similar devices.
Yes, mobiles, PSPs, specialized devices like SONY’s Mylo can all kinda do the web. But we’ve been waiting for a critical mass, a solid user base, and above all unified platform to make the promise a good business proposition.
A lot of people have been waiting the iPhone with extraordinary enthusiasm. Today Apple made two announcements which I think will have enormous impact on the future of the mobile web.
1. Webapps are the way for developers to write apps for the iPhone. But why that’s important is that they will run in Safari, the heart of which, Webkit, is an open source, highly standards compliant rendering engine, used not only in Safari, but in browsers like Nokia’s open source S60 platform.
2. Safari is now available on Windows (XP and Vista), so whether your primary platform for development is Mac or Windows (with Linux you aren’t quite out of luck, as KHTML shares a lot of common functionality at its core with Safari), you have a standards compliant browser that will also allow you to target the iPhone.
Now, with over a billion mobile phones, a sizeable percentage of which do have some kind of web support, why will a few million iPhones, perhaps a percent or two of all such possible devices, make any kind of difference?
One of the biggest drawbacks to mobile web adoption has been data cost. Pricing for data on a handset has typically been ridiculously expensive, metred by the byte, and very opaquely priced. As a consequence, people simply don’t think about using data based or web services.
The other drawback is that the hand held web interface is an utterly different paradigm from the web most people are familiar with — on their computer. When you don’t know what its going to cost you, are you going to experiment, play, learn? I think it’s unlikely.
The iPhone addresses both these.
The iPhone has wifi enabled, and so when you have access to a wifi network, you can use the real web, for free, on a device designed for that purpose, rather than having to use your mobile network. If you know how the mobile market works in the US, where features like bluetooth are routinely disabled in devices due to the carriers, you’ll perhaps see why Apple is so important here — few others would have the clout to achieve this.
So, while the iPhone will account for a tiny percentage of phone users, I’d argue that very quickly, it will account for a significant percentage of all mobile web users. And because its web interface is very similar to the familiar PC web interface, with a largish high resolution screen, users will already be familiar with the basic paradigm, and so much more likely to play around with it. And, very importantly, developers will find it much easier to design and test web content and apps for the device, even without getting their hands on an iPhone, because it’s running Safari.
I don’t think Apple will necessarily own the mobile web, as they do the mobile music space, but I think they have invented what the mobile web will look like. Anyone who follows their suit, and many will, will make a web experience that is very similar.
Safari on the iPhone is the Mosaic of the mobile web.
One of the things we really focussed on this year with content for the conference was the mobile web, which ties in well with the excitement that we think the next few months will see in relation to the mobile web. We are privileged to have one of the real Mobile Web design and development gurus, Brian Fling speaking at the conference on “Web 2.0 + Mobile 2.0″, and delivering a full day workshop Mobile web design and development — Everything you need to know about creating sites for the mobile web from start to finish.
[tags]webkit, iphone, safari, web2.0, mobile web[/tags]
I think this post is very unfair to Opera (and even Nokia).
We already have two mobile browsers that can access the real full web, that use the full Opera rendering engine and include things like CSS3 Media Queries and handheld stylesheets to allow designers to customise for mobile (Safari doesn’t support handheld stylesheets).
Opera Mobile supports webapps or mobile widgets. We had this before Safari
We are also already cross platform, but include more platforms including Linux and BSD, and many many more phones, from feature phones like the razr to Windows Mobile, S60 and UIQ. We have deals with major carriers like T-mobile, Telefonica, KDDI and phone manufacturers like Nokia, Sony Eriksson, Motorola, Palm, Samsung etc, so both Opera Mobile and Opera Mini are widely distributed and will be distributed even more in the future. One can also test for Opera using the desktop browser as it has a mobile mode that respects handheld stylesheets or uses small screen rendering. To test the desktop mode you can just use the regular desktop mode too.
Opera Mini compresses pages on the server, so the running cost will be lower than Safari on iPhone. There are also already WiFi enabled phones out there that Opera will run on. The P990 is an example.
Opera Mobile already has a desktop view just like Safari uses and the S60 browser. We also use a similar technique on the Nintendo Wii.
Now, don’t get me wrong, Safari is a great browser, Safari on iPhone is probably also great, but it isn’t anything that hasn’t been done before, no matter how strong Steve Jobs’ reality distortion field is. They’ve just got more mind share and a bigger marketing budget. Lets have some love for the little guys ;)
Hi Dave,
thanks for the detailed comment. I’ll start by saying that it was viwing my site in Opera on a Sony Ericssen phone in 2003 (and it worked) which really kickstarted my excitement about the mobile web. I’d long been banging on bout using CSS etc etc cause your sites will work when the mobile web takes off, but this was living proof.
Perhaps my analogy would have been better put that the iPhone is the netscape of the mobile web. I was actually a long Mosaic holdout in fact, but while Netscape did little if anything novel in comparison with Mosaic, at least initially, it was somehow associated with the web tipping across into mainstream use.
I do believe that the iPhone (perhaps precisely because of Jobs legendary RDF) will mark a watershed in the tipping point of the mobile web. But I don’t thnk it will be bad for all the other handset and embedded browser folks, because unlike mp3 players, there are so many other dynamics — telcos, demographics, diferent kinds of use and so on. If it only makes mobile carriers stop their insistence on crippling devices, as they do in the US, it will be a very important moment for the whole industry.
So, please don’t take my comments as a criticism of Opera’s technology, and thanks for outlining all that Opera has done and is doing — as a software developer, I know what it is like or others to get the glory for stuff you’ve been doing for ages ;-) We love the little guys.
And maybe we’ll see you down here in September?
j
Hi John,
Yeah, I think you are right in that Apple has the budget and marketing know how to push an established concept and push it main stream. We are certainly seeing added interest from carriers and phone providers post iPhone announcement, as they want to be able to compete, and Opera is one of the few companies that produce a high quality full web browser on phones.
I wish I could talk more about Opera Mini 4, but I’ll have to wait until the 19th. I think it is going impress a lot of people, especially considering the low end hardware it can run on. I’d recommend anyone to download the beta and give us feedback.
I’ll most likely be at Web Directions South, so I’ll probably see you and Maxine there. I’ll hopefully meet Russ and the rest of the Australian crew too.
Look forward to seeing you in Sydney — you’ll see a load of Aussies there — it’s the place to be.
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