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Comment by navs | Hacker News Reader

I love the look of WP7 and this phone looks decent!

I don't generally use apps, preferring webapps on the mobile browser. How does WP7's browser compare to Android or iOS? I've heard some say its good, others saying its terrible. Its hard to get an unbiased answer after years of thrashing desktop IE.

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I've recently purchased a WP7, initially the browser was horrible, now they've upgraded it to IE9 it's much better, but I've still noticed problems on some pages, most notable of which is the new version of the Facebook Touch site. It's much better on my Android and IOS devices than it is on WP7, I'm not sure whether thats IE9's fault or Facebooks for not testing it on those devices, but it looks worse and has a bunch of rendering errors.

So the varying opinions are probably both Mango vs older WP7 versions, and also certain websites not being tested on it (perhaps using mobile webkit specific stuff)

Although IE has been updated to 9 with Mangoo which is a decent browser, i would expect the same problems Opara gets with cutting edge stuff: You are very lucky if the app got tested for IE. I never encountered serious problems though, even with IE7.

IE getting punished by the marketplace for not adhering to standards?! The prayers of a hundred thousand angry webdevs have surely been answered :-)

you assume that most websites care about standards. They don't.[1] Writing truly standards compliant html is too much hassle for most people out there, and brings next to nothing in value. What they do is test it against the important implementations: On the desktop IE 7+, Firefox 3+, Chrome. For mobile sites they test for both webkit flavors, and that's it.

Again, IE mobile is facing the same problems as Opara: Both are very decent browsers, but they have different ways of handling the strange corner cases in the tag soup out there than the market leaders.

errata: The web has become a lot better w/r to standards in the last couple of years. Like I said before, I've encountered very few glitches with IE7, and none so far with IE9.

[1]http://html5.validator.nu/?doc=http%3A%2F%2Fnews.ycombinator...

  > Writing truly standards compliant html is too much hassle
  > for most people out there

This may be true (the "too much hassle" part), but writing standards compliant html is very easy. Or just easy, depending how semantically clean you want it to be.

  > and brings next to nothing in value.

This is wrong. Unless savings on network traffic, time spent on maintenance and page load times are of now value to developer.

In mobile, that's not actually the case. People tend to throw in the -webkit- css prefixes and nothing else. So Opera, Firefox and IE all suffer.

An important caveat: IE9 mobile does not support @font-face.

It used to be really bad, but Mango improved it a lot. For example, pre-Mango IE didn't properly zoom into form text fields like the iPhone does, which made entering text unnecessarily frustrating.

As far as I know pre-Mango IE was ~ 7, while the Mango one is branded as 9, so a huge leap, which might account for some of the difference in opinions.

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