Hacker News Reader

Comment by colinplamondon | Hacker News Reader

It's not about the iPhone, it's about Webkit.

He seems to forget the fact that hardware sales doesn't translate into actual internet usage. The internet outside of iPhone, Android, and Palm is so terrible that barely anyone even bothers to use it. What do those three platforms have in common? Webkit!

View on HN

This statement may be true for your personal experience, but is in fact completely wrong.

Emerging economies such as India have huge mobile Internet populations. In fact in India mobile Internet outnumbers PC based internet 3 to 1 with a mobile Internet use north of 37million users, very few of which are using iPhones.

http://research.nokia.com/files/MobileInternetUsageInIndia.p...

http://mobiforge.com/analysts/blog/mobile-internet-users-ind...

http://knowledge.wharton.upenn.edu/india/article.cfm?article...

Yes but in PPK's words: There is no “WebKit on mobile!” - http://www.quirksmode.org/webkit.html

The table does give that impression. Would it still give that impression if the width of each column were proportional to how many active, web-surfing users there are for each device/version pair listed? I'm sure the iPhone 2.x column, for example, would be a narrow sliver.

Nokia's browser is also based on WebKit.

The Nokia N900 runs a gecko-based browser.

And recently Mozilla released Fennec for Maemo. :-)

Yes but only geeks know how to download that...

Actually, Fennec was the development name. The release is branded Mobile Firefox or Firefox for Mobile. Mozilla only puts the Firefox brand on finished releases.

Ok, so say you want to make a website that works reasonably well on all the major "smartphone" platforms that use WebKit. And furthermore, say you don't have the budget to get your hands on all of them, or even to go through a testing service.

Is there a WebKit-based browser that you can download where, if it looks good there, it should look ok on all these phones?

EDIT: Oops, I think edd's post below answers my question.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com