What I'm working on at Google: Making the mobile web fast
matt-welsh.blogspot.com
matt-welsh.blogspot.com
It reminds me of a post-war vision statement at Sony which was basically be the company that "changes the worldwide poor-quality image of Japanese products." It wasn't just about Sony, it was about the whole country -- that's cool.
He talks a bit about it in the article too: "At a high level we are planning to tackle problems in three broad areas: The mobile devices themselves; the services they connect to; and the networks that connect them. On the device side, we are looking at a wide range of OS, network stack, and browser enhancements to improve performance. On the service side, we are looking at better ways to architect websites for mobile clients, providing tools to help web developers maximize their performance, and automatic optimizations that can be performed by a site or in a proxy service. Finally, at the network layer we are looking at the (sometimes painful) interactions between different layers of the protocol stack and identifying ways to streamline them."
The implementation of CSS media queries is broken in nearly all shipped handsets making them pointless as an optimization for sending the correct images to browsers. This isn't likely to change for quite a while.
The Android browser really needs to auto-update like the desktop Chrome.
Google is still pushing updates to the Nexus One and Nexus S, so it's not like it's the past.
By the way what I'm talking about is a limitation of Android itself: it has no package management system (with dependencies, upgrade etc.) for core components. And what I'm proposing would allow certain parts of the system to be upgraded while carrier junk stays there.
Google is actually already doing that for Gmail, Market, Music, Maps and other apps. Why not the browser ? (even if for now it uses a separate libwebkit)