Mobile browser testing
From MediaWiki.org
It would be nice if we could test MediaWiki's behavior more regularly in browsers for mobile and handheld devices. I'm collecting resources I come across here:
[edit] Development and testing claims |
||
|---|---|---|
| Device | Browser | Owner |
| (simulated) | Opera Mini | brion |
| iPhone | Mobile Safari | brion |
| PalmTX | Palm Blazer v4.3 | pfctdayelise |
| Palm Treo 700p | Blazer | Aerik |
Contents |
[edit] Opera Mini
Opera Mini is a client-server variant of Opera, whose client side can run on many Java-enabled mobile phones and other handheld devices. There is a simulator which runs the client side as a Java applet in a desktop web browser. Nice! VERY convenient and easy to test.
Additionally, regular Opera can be switched into a "small-screen mode" which is similar to the rendering of Opera Mini.
[edit] Issues
Anchor links seem to jump to the top of the page, making the 'navigation' and 'search' accessibility links and the table of contents kind of unproductiveInfoboxes seem to take absurdly large amounts of screen real estate before you get to content in many articles :PCss and Js are not read, which render a very different presentation that on a classical browser.
As of January 2008, the version in the simulator renders pages very much like they appear on a "grown-up" browser, requiring you to zoom in to read anything.
Looks and behaves a *lot* like Mobile Safari, but without a touchscreen that seems awkward to me. :)
As with the iPhone, the much improved HTML and CSS etc support is verrrrry welcome, but to make the site more easily usable we should still look into a good handheld stylesheet.
[edit] Windows Mobile
Windows Mobile / PocketPC / Windows CE / whatever it's called this week powers a lot of PDAs and fancier mobile phones, and comes with some variant of Internet Explorer.
Microsoft supplies an emulator which runs on Windows PCs and includes OS images for Windows Mobile including IE. Unfortunately I haven't had any luck getting networking up, so haven't managed to connect to anything to see how it's going. I'm not sure if this is because of some quirk of Parallels' network bridging, so it might be easier on a real Windows PC.
- Device Emulator 1.0 With Windows Mobile OS Images
- Virtual Machine Network Driver for Microsoft Device Emulator (possibly not needed if VirtualPC is installed?)
- directions on getting networking up which didn't work for me (note from chris rue: this method will not work inside a virtual environment, as indicated at the beginning of the post)
- wm5 device emulator: network connectivity inside a virtual environment from chris rue: this method works for enabling connectivity to device emulator when it's installed inside a virtual environment. can't personally test this method using parallels (since i don't have a mac), but would appreciate knowing the outcome if someone tries it. thanks!
- javascript is not functional, and several additional stuff used by project's Monobook.js are not available.
[edit] PlayStation Portable
The webbrowser of the PlayStation Portable is a NetFront browser. It doesn't render MediaWiki correctly, especially in Smart-Fit and Just-Fit modes.
What could help is supplementing MediaWiki by using useragent sniffing to adapt the layout (by CSS) to a resolution of 480x272 px. That should work to make it doable to use MediaWiki on a PlayStation Portable.
[edit] iPhone
iPhone and iPod Touch ship with a Safari variant, running on the WebKit engine. It's pretty complete, with very good HTML, CSS, and JS support.
A general impression of rendering can be tested reasonably well just by pulling up Safari 3 on a Mac or Windows box (or even a current WebKit-based browser on Linux, I imagine), however the zoom behavior and usability of forms is hard to test without an actual device handy.
[edit] Issues
General layout and sizing are not very convenient with the stock MonoBook skin, but MediaWiki is fully functional.
Some custom styles and a more linear layout would be beneficial.
Have added support for home screen bookmarking icons.
[edit] All mobile device browsers
- ergonomy not fit for small-sized screens. Links that we would need to reach easily are at the bottom (harder to get to since the page is longer on a smaller screen), like the search form.
- at the bottom of the page, information about mediawiki, copyright etc. should be put on a separate page and replaced with a link so as to not bother user with 2-3 screens of footnotes.
Bigger problem with MediaWiki, shown most obviously when viewing Wikipedia, is that modern browsers on smart phones and PDAs do support cascading style sheets (Ex: Palm Centro, Palm Treo 650/680/700/755, and Palm Tungsten TX). Unfortunately the only media types supported by MediaWiki style sheets are "screen, projection" and "print" and the resulting display on mobile devices is unacceptable unless you first disable cascading style sheets. Can we please get the media type "handheld" supported, even if this just loads a dummy style sheet.
This problem was first raised in 2005 (#2090) and the issue seems to be being ignored even though it now potentially affects millions of users of MediaWiki-based sites.
