I am trying to develop a mobile application, which should run on all smartphones, tablets and some feature phones. I have used CSS3 media queries before and tested in Android and iOS, where it works like a charm. But what about Nokia and Bada OS, does this work ?
You can take a look at the indispensable Mobile compatibility chart from Peter-Paul Koch. Media Queries are pretty well supported, as long as the browser is Opera, Firefox or uses the Webkit engine (virtually all modern mobile browsers do). You might have some trouble getting it to work on older Blackberries and Windows Mobile 7 and lower though.
Related
I'm developing a new website with mobile support, and I want to try using "responsive design"/"adaptive design"/CSS media queries. I'm wondering if there's a recent report of mobile browsers that support media queries. If not, what is a reasonable approximation?
I use this site all the time when I need to check out cross-browser support:
caniuse.com This site says support for media queries (across all browsers) is at 78.37%
Support for mobile browsers is at 100%.
About 80%. You don't need to worry about Android, Opera Mini and iOS, but then there's the other 20% with Bada, old Blackberry phones, Windows Mobile... So you should add a polyfill life respond.js which will be helpfull for desktop browsers than don't support media queries like IE8 and bellow.
About 87.14% support and 0.01% partial support. See more: http://caniuse.com/css-mediaqueries
Looking if Fennec supports Addons compatibility in Mobile Platforsm like iOs for iphone, Android or Windows.
Also looking forward for guidelines to develop extensions development to use it in Fennec for mobile platforms.
Yes, Fennec supports add-ons. In general, you develop you add-on just like for the desktop Firefox: How do I write a Firefox Addon?
There are currently two Fennec variants around. The "old" one uses a XUL-based user interface and multiple processes. Here is a good entry point if you are looking for documentation.
The "new" one uses a native Android user interface - it will soon replace the XUL-based variant on the mobile phones, tablets should follow a bit later. It uses a single process like the desktop Firefox. There is very little documentation at the moment, it's mostly this text.
Hi I am developing a mobile version of my WordPress site using WP Touch Pro, are there any good emulators so I can see the results on different platforms?
yup:
http://www.electricplum.com/dlsim.html
will show you ipad and iphone simulations.
If you're on a Mac, you can use the free iOS SDK which includes an iOS Simulator. Android also has one; it takes a few extra steps to setup, but it's also free and cross-platform. Blackberry has one as well, pretty much all platforms do. I develop mobile sites all the time and these are the tools I use, and they're invaluable.
This has a few different emulations available: http://mobiletest.me/
This is a great extension for chrome , User-Agent Switcher for Chrome
Is there a good all in one emulator for testing mobile websites. Just using 'media queries and need to test on predominantly iphone, blackberry, android, and windows 7 phones.
Many thanks,
C
There is no one solution that will work on all these platforms however the SDKs for all include simulators/emulators and the best part is that all but for the iPhone are free.
BlackBerry Simulators
Android Emulator
Windows Phone 7 Emulator
The iPhone SDK also includes a simulator (Mac only) but if you need to test on a PC, you can do a pretty good job using http://iphone4simulator.com/ running in Safari for Windows.
As with all simulator/emulator usage, these are good for initial testing but you need to use an actual device to get true results.
Also note that different BlackBerry devices use different default browsers. Android devices also use varying versions of WebKit so you may see some variation between actual devices which isn't shown in the emulator.
In addition to Matt's reply, I think you should also test the different browsers available for smartphones.
For example the popular Opera mobile: http://www.opera.com/mobile/demo/
You might find http://quirktools.com/screenfly/ very useful for testing mobile websites on different screen sizes. It's not as true as a native emulator, but it allows you to test several phones, tablets, etc. at one site and you don't have to install any software.
try http://www.browserstack.com/. This one is not free, but it gives a trial period of 30 minutes for each account we create
Try Mobile web browser emulator this free tools help you testing mobile websites
If you just want to simulate the mobile device user agent and screen resolutions, also check out chrome's mobile device simulator https://developer.chrome.com/devtools/docs/device-mode#enable-device-mode
I recently did the Chris Coyier tutorial from the css-tricks.com weblog #38: Basics & Tips on Designing for the iPhone. Needless to say I got very excited and suggested to a guy that I do some code monkey work for that we could now offer iPhone websites to his clients. He said cool, but what about other mobile devices? good question. So what is the low down on designing websites for Android, Blackberry, WindowsMobile, etc? Are people bothering with the other platforms? Thanks.
Recent Webkit and Opera:
For iPhone Safari, Opera Mobile, and Webkit on Android development are similar (but not identical), and development for those is quite simple.
You can rely on CSS2.1 and JavaScript+DOM (but be careful with UI events). You might get away with serving your regular website with just few changes to stylesheets.
The trick is in serving of these stylesheets. Don't use User-Agent string.
Because some mobile browsers read handheld media, and some insist on screen styles and pretend to have 960px-wide screen (iPhone :/), you'll need to serve mobile stylesheet with both:
<link media="handheld" ...>
<link media="screen and max-device-width:480px" ...>
The latter is CSS3 Media Query – very useful and works with other mobile browsers too (you can use it in stylesheets with #media {}).
Don't rely on :hover or onmouseover because these events don't work on touch screens.
onclick is delayed, mousemove may not work. Custom DHTML widgets (dropdowns, sliders) and drag'n'drop won't work on touchscreens, unless you use touch events (which thankfully all newest browsers adopted).
Viewport
In addition to Apple's proprietary (and IMHO inflexible and violating separation between markup and layout) <meta name=viewport> have a look at CSS3 #viewport, which currently is supported in latest Opera as #-o-viewport and hopefully others will follow.
Simulators/Emulators
To test page in Opera Mobile, get the simulator (or just older desktop version and choose View → Small Screen).
Opera Mini is special, as CSS is re-formatted a bit and DHTML is executed on server-side, which doesn't always give results you'd expect. There's simulator available.
Android
You need Android SDK, fiddle with commandline to launch its clunky UI, download bunch of packages, create virtual device with dozen of irrelevant obscure settings, have patience for this monster to load and turn computer's fans into a quadcopter, and then you can sss..sss..slooowlyyyy test in the "Browser" (my Intel i5 is too slow to simulate Galaxy Tab - browser "stops responding" even before I finish typing URL)
It's easier to get a phone/tablet with Android and test on a real device (but avoid Samsung's Player "iPod" equivalent, as it's rubbish with obsolete software).
Android browser is really painful for anyone who doesn't love Linux way of doing things — just to read JS console you need to fiddle with remote debug connections and log filtering on commandline.
Firefox Mobile (previously Fennec)
There's simulator available (links for "Windows / Mac OS X / Linux" below mobile downloads are not the desktop version, but mobile-for-desktop-OS).
Simulator is very basic, Mobile Firefox itself is IMHO really good, e.g. overflow:scroll works great, while on WebKit-based browsers overflow implementation varies between very unintuitive and totally broken.
Pocket IE:
PIE for Windows Mobile < 7 is not the same engine as IE on Windows. It's mostly as primitive and buggy as IE4 was, but (barely) supports some surprisingly advanced properties like display:table.
It reads both handheld and screen stylesheets at the same time, violating the standard and shooting itself in the foot. If you're going to suppot PIE, then put link to handheld stylesheet last and reverse/override all the rules from screen styles in it.
Anyway, it's dead and it's hard to get an emulator.
Windows Phone 7 currently ships with IE7-alike, and Microsoft promised something of IE9 level later.
New (minority) BlackBerry
The latest WebKit-based BlackBerry browser is quite good, you can treat it as 1st-class citizen (see WebKits comparison linked at the top).
Currently most popular BlackBerry & OpenWave, Blazer, etc.:
Before the BB OS6, it's a nightmare. Only basic HTML works. CSS works on some models, but is primitive and broken. JavaScript works only on some models and it's incredibly slow and lacking (forget about even basic DHTML).
There's free BB simulator available from RIM (annoying registration required). If you're unlucky, it'll launch properly once and then you'll have to completely reinstall it :)
The same thing is with hundreds of other mobile browsers on low-end phones (powered by likes of OpenWave, which has decent simulator) . You'll have to prepare 1-column basic HTML stripped down website for them.
Google Wireless Transcoder
Even if you create nifty (X)HTML optimized for every mobile device out there, users of Google Mobile Search will never see it!
Instead, every page will be proxied through "Wireless Transcoder" which brutally chops the code, stripping all stylesheets and scripts (regardless whether browser supports them or not), and even <font> :(