Yesterday, in reaction to pointer events becoming a W3C recommendation, Tim Kadlec published an important piece about Apple’s huge influence on the mobile web.

I agree with him to the extent of writing this extended Me-Too entry. It is increasingly becoming necessary to do something about Apple, its absolute refusal to talk to anyone, and its dickish way of bending the mobile web to its desires. Personally, I became tired of Safari quite a while ago, and I wouldn’t mind taking Apple down a notch.

So let’s do it.

continue reading

Mobilism, 27th of March in Amsterdam, is going to be a stellar conference. All the content is in, and we're excited. What about you? Judge for yourself.

continue reading

Last week Niels Leenheer of HTML5 Test told me he’d released a simple Android app that mimics a browser but runs in the device’s WebView. This is ideal for testing WebViews, a topic I’ve ignored so far.

I downloaded the app to all my Android 4/5 phones except for the Huawei C8813 (Chinese firmware) where Google Play won’t run, and the LG L5, where the app crashes when you try to load a page, and catalogued which browser the WebView is (or purports to be). Here are the results:

continue reading

From last Thursday to earlier today I held a simple one-question poll about which advanced input types such as date and number web developers are using.

The results are surprising, while I expected date and number to end in first and second place, the most popular type was actually email.

continue reading

With my recent Chromia research in mind it’s time to study the browser stats for Q3 and Q4 2014, as always according to StatCounter. For the first time I give consolidated browser stats across all devices.

Headlines:

• Safari on iOS is now bigger than Firefox.
• The non-Google Chromia are now bigger than Safari on Mac.
• Mobile is at 31% of overall browser market share. That’s nearly one third.
• The Blink rendering engine is now at 43% market share.

continue reading

In my Chrome post I bewailed the lack of stats that doesn’t allow me to figure out how important non-Google Chromia are. Today, however, I received 100K Chromium hits from a Dutch mobile ad network. Although these numbers are not representative for the entire world, any data is better than no data, so here it goes.

continue reading

Google Chrome is not the default browser on Android 4.3+. There are now at least eight Chromium-based Android default browsers, and they are all subtly, though not wildly, different.

The number of Chromium family members has recently risen from nine to eleven with the addition of HTC and LG Chromium, default browsers for modern HTC and LG high-end devices.

Moreover, LG uses at least two different versions (30 and 34) concurrently, while HTC replaced Android WebKit by HTC Chromium over the air. As far as I know none of this has been done before — so far.

In order to prove that they’re different we will study zoom reflow, a feature that HTC and Xiaomi support, but the others, including Google, don’t.

continue reading