Young Samurai

I use Firefox for the development of my mobile sites.

My sites all look fine in FF and Chrome and any of the emulators I try, but they fall apart in IE.

Should I be concerned?

Kyle

Jay Moreno

i would be more concerned about how well your sites look on real handsets such as the iphone and android if thats the type of phone you are targeting... it also wouldnt harm to check out what they really look like on a few feature phones and something like the Blackberry 8000 series...

If you do not have access to a physical handset - take a look at the free trial at perfectomobile.com

hope that helps

jay

Steve Solem

I could be wrong but I don't know of any mobile devices using any form of IE for browsing (not sure what the new windows phones use), but I prefer Mobilizer | Springbox to test 4 of the most popular devices and that website Jay mentioned looks like a good solution too.

Cheers,

Steve

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Young Samurai

Jay & Steve,

I agree about Mobilizer - so easy to use and lightweight. The screenshots is a great option.

Hadn't considered PerfectoMobile. Just signed up to the free trial and tested out 4 or 5 sites.

Happily all appeared fine.

PerfectoMobile is a big animal, lots of options and not cheap, but it is great to be able to test your site in so many different machine in real time - reassuring too.

Jay, do you use Perfecto and if so is it what it claims - using real mobiles in real time?

Kyle

Mary Wilhite

=============

Hi Kyle,

I think you should focus more on how your target audience would see your site in their phones....

Mary

Nail Yener

Creating a mobile site that works on as much browsers/devices as possible is our goal. I came across some mobile devices that use previous versions of Internet Explorer and in some cases, they didn't display some parts of my sites correctly. Sometimes, it just doesn't make sense to try to fit your design to every browser version. If you have the time and resources, then go for it. If you don't, making sure that your sites look fine on popular smartphones and latest browsers will be enough.

Internet Explorer is the worse browser among the popular ones. It is a real headache for web designers. If I had a button to remove all IE installations in the world, I would gladly push that button. Its previous versions, before IE9, have very little support for some of the mostly used CSS features. Even IE9 is not close to Firefox or Chrome, that's why they are working on IE10 now.

Jay Moreno

@youngsamari

Yes i believe they are real devices and they have some kind of test rig setup

Was using the paid version for a little while but found it easier/cheaper to invest in our own test lab of real handsets.

We currently use:

iphone3gs
itouch
android 2.2 - samsung captivate
blackberry 8500
ipad v1
oldschool open wave browser - small screen samsung

hope that helps

jay

midasman09

Try "Mobile Moxie" (Mobile Phone Emulator: Apple, RIM, DoCoMo, HTC, Motorola, Nokia, Samsung | MobileMoxie: Mobile Marketing and SEO Consulting and Free Tools)

It's an "Emulator"...not a "Simulator"....which shows exactly what a site looks like on about 50 Phones....and....if you're using FireFox...it will show "Blank" space when it sees any "Flash" (Great for telling the owners of the "Flash" sites the "bad news" that, after spending much moola on Flash... their expensive sites do NOT show on Apple devices! Ca-Shing, Ca-Shing!)

And....it's FREE!

Don Alm....picking up "Low-Hanging-Fruit"

Young Samurai

A couple of things:

Firstly, I only use the desktop browser in the initial stages of putting a site together. I find it easier to see small changes and the availability of Firebug in FF is invaluable. I only happened to open one site in IE and was simply concerned by its appearance and wondered if that was significant. The consensus seems to be - don't worry about it.

Secondly, the suggestions and advice offered by each of the above contributors is much appreciated.


Midasman09, the ability to detect Flash is great - and for free. Thanks.

Kyle

ballanrk

If your happy with the way your site looks in the simulators then just be sure to run it through the w3c mobile validator just to make sure it's truly mobile optimized.

Above 90% your golden
Above 80% maybe images are to large, possible HTML5 hiccups, etc.

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WillR

I think you will find a lot of web developers gave up on IE a long time ago. It's a nightmare of a browser and the sooner it is gone the better.

You also can't believe all the stats you see regarding how many people are still using IE these days. I think half of those installs would just be web developers (like all of us) who have the browser on our computer for no other reason than to check if sites look/work ok inside of it.

For mobile websites especially, I wouldn't even give IE a second thought. Chances are if you are a person who still uses IE, you are already used to seeing a lot of things not as they should be.

.

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Young Samurai

Thanks guys for the input.

ballanrk,

the scale for w3c is appreciated.

Will,

the short version of all this is, ignore IE completely.

Kyle

lint631

I myself use a FF window open and just shrink the size. I have Dreamweaver open up next to me so I can update the browser quickly. I also use Opera's Mobile Emulator. Works like a charm!

Opera Mobile Emulator

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M Mark

Is there a free mobile online emulator that shows several platforms at once

Jay Moreno

you cant beat real screenshots from real devices/handsets + limited FREE trial...

Mobile Application Testing on Real Devices - Perfecto Mobile

cheers

jay

PS in all actuality if you are serious about mobile web development create yourself a real test suite...

an itouch for simulating the iphone - no contract needed.
an android no contract needed if you use the wifi connection
a blackberry again no contract needed if you the wifi connection
an ipad - if you want to test that...

i have found that you can get brand new blackberries and androids on pay as you go contracts - or even buy used from places like craigslist (Be careful when you use CL if you meet someone in person), ebay, and phone repair shops.

hth