Mhackintosh blog

I am a Web Consultant, working home in Montréal for different companies, and handling a large file-sharing website. I am -really- experienced, starting web development in 1994, and developing some of the biggest french web site (iBazar that we sold  to eBay to become eBay France). So I am not your casual web developer.

Supported browsers

When we develop large website, we target different browsers on different platforms, actually including iPhone. The iPhone, and iPad, have different behavior due to multitouch-screen that disable us to use drag-and-drop (interpreted as scrolling on these platforms), have different resolution that desktop/laptop computers, and we should handle rotation as a mandatory requirement to enable a great user experience.

iPhone and iPad use Safari, that is a really great browser with a strong engine. Interface, specifications, everything is released by Apple or in public-domain. But it needs specific design, as well as separate tests and CSS/Javascript development. This is a huge amount of work that stack up to the usual work on desktop/laptop development.

So, we try to support Windows PC, from IE6 to IE8 (we begin to drop IE6 tests and won’t support it for long, but IE9 Apha or Beta will come instead!), FireFox 3.5 & 3.6, Safari 3 & 4, and Chrome. We naturally support Mac with Safari 3 & 4, FireFox 3.5 & 3.6, and Chrome too. We don’t support or test on Linux, where FireFox shines with a great compatibility with Mac & PC platforms, and as we all use Linux for development, we occasionnaly use the website under Linux, it’s informal testing, but we know for sue it works.

Consequences for developers

This is a lot of platforms, OS, browsers, and number test-bench and patterns are exponentially growing. We add to that the iPhone (and will add iPad for sure) that needs platforms specific-tests (rotation, specific-touchscreen interface on Javascript, HTTP query analysis, http objects sizes to cope with their caching policy, …). It’s everything but obvious or simple. On some development, tests might require much more efforts, time and finally money spent than conception+development itself!

So adding Opera or another on iPhone or iPad is not a good idea. From the developer point-of-view, it’s another test bench, another risk of incompatibilities, because Opera on iPhone use a different model than any other web browser, a specific engine, relatively unknown, with probably lot of bugs (as others, but on Firefox or Safari they are wll known and easily fixed), so it will add many time to our test, for what?

For less than 1% of our user-base? It is worth the effort? Naturally we won’t support a browser that represent less than 1% of our user-base, especially if there’s alternative, and moreover a NATIVE PRE-INSTALLED browser that is efficient, reliable and gives a real great user experience! It has just no sense, and our CEO won’t allow for that!

Consequences for the user of websites

From the iPod or iPad owner, it will translate to many problems on their daily use of many websites: using a non-supported browser, that act differently than any other may lead to presentation bugs, javascript errors, some forms may even not work, disabling some features of the website. A totally horrible user-experience, something I don’t want to experiment as a user!

In short…

Opera might do a great job, even with a faster web browser, that I plan to test and check, because I am a geek

But from the developer point-of-view, from web companies point-of-view or from the casual user point-of-view, supportig it or using it will only lead to problem, at least until it represent a huge installed base. And it wont represent a huge installed base until problems are fixed!

Stay with Safari on iPhone or iPad, developers like me are trying to give you the best user-experience with it, re-designing website for it, improving interfaces to take into account all the features of your iXXXX, and testing it carefully to avoid any problem.

I dream of a simple application on iPad that may enable me to develop or fix problems on my web servers. As iPad seems not to enable multitasking, it should be an 1-in-all application that provide:

• Code Editor for PHP, HTML, CSS, XML, Javascript…
• SVN/CVS support (maybe GIT too)
• Integrated web browser (using Apple’s webkit)
• PHP interpreter (w/ in-memory sessions)
• MySQL embedded-server (simplified and optimized for SSD/Flash storage)
• SSH terminal, with multiple tabs and scp copy
• ftp too (but it’s totally unsecure!)
• a way to interface directly to bug trackers (webservice?)
• ability to read and answer email (because we are all exchaning using email WHILE working)

This might begin without PHP and MySQL, to enable at least develop remotely on a web server or test server, but adding them will make it incredibly efficient!

One problem I see at this point, it’s full support for Javascript events, that will need specialized interface on the browser, as “click-and-move” isn’t supported on touchscreen where it translate to a scroll: you need a way to switch between the 2 behaviors!

PS: a second-one whould be to have a mini-lightroom to browse photo, organize them, tag them quickly, do some basic corrections, syncrhonize that with my Mac, and moreover support basic calibration to display pictures correctly! I am a dreamer

What a number! 120 000 iPad pre-ordered by people that don’t even tried one, never seen one, and doesn’t know exactly what’s inside and what the iPad will be able to do!

Just one word come in my mind about it : trustiness!

They all trust Apple, that impressed anyone with the iPhone, to be able to deliver something better than any other company. And be the first company to have a tablet that just work where all other failed miserably!

For myself, the reasons why I don’t pre-ordered one was first that I don’t know at this point if I will go for 3G+wifi or wifi-only, if I will need 32GB or 64 GB. Tricky choice!

PS: in fact I know what I need, it’s probably the 64GB version if I could play my music using my Airport Express on every room of my home, 16GB elsewhere, but I would like to know the price of 250MB 3G data here in Canada, to decide if I will go for a 3G model..

For me, to not have Flash player plug-on in iPad is not a weakness, it’s a feature, a competitive feature, the kinda that make it better than the other, more resistant to internet attack and less likely to crash for any reason!

There is a bug in Flash Player, that is there since 2008, known from Adobe, correctly reported, and that crash any version of Flash Player since 2 years, whatever you patch or not!

If you follow this link, Flash Player will crash, and your browser may crash too (Safari 4 security model protect it against the crash). Don’t follow link if you have other browsing windows open you may loose them all.

Do you imagine having a security bug, known since 2008 in your iPhone or iPod Touch, that will crash it anytime? And an editor not willing to correct it in the following day, nor even within weeks, not even months but YEARS???

I don’t want to have Adobe Flash Player on my iPhone or my future iPad, and I would like to get ride of it on my computer!

PS: I forgot to tell about CPU cycle consumption and memory use of Flash, that render it totally useless on mobile devices! Something that s**k on a Core2 Duo 2×2.8Ghz will be totally unresponsive on ARM at 0.6Ghz! You must try Flash on a Pentium3 500Mhz, to have an idea of what will be delivered!