Understanding Mobile Browsers

The technology

What do mobile browsers do? They typically connect through a cellular network; some increasingly connect through Wireless LAN, employing HTTP over TCP/IP. They display web pages written in WML, HTML, or XHTML Mobile Profile. HDML and WML are stripped-down formats that are tailor-made for transmission across wireless data connection (WAP) and limited bandwidth. WAP 2.0 specifies WAP CSS and XHTML Mobile Profile, subsets of W3C's XHTML and CSS with secondary mobile extensions. The latest mobile browsers are Web browsers that are capable of HTML, ECMAScript, CSS, and also mobile technologies like cHTML, i-mode HTML, or WML.

Popular mobile browsers

Since many mobile browsers are in fact miniaturized Web browsers, many companies that develop mobile browser also offer browsers for laptop and desktop computers. Some of the more popular browsers used by major PDA and mobile phone include: Google's Android, Microsoft's Internet Explorer Mobile, BlackBerry Browser by Research in Motion, Infraware's Embider, Danger browser, Nokia Series 40 Browser, Novarra nWeb, and Safari by Apple.

The following are some of the more popular user-installable microbrowsers: Deepfish Beta from Microsoft, iPanel for Palm OS, JOCA by InteracT!V, Opera Mobile and Opera Mini, Mozilla Foundation's Minimo, Pixo by Sun Microsystems, TeaShark, AnOriginalIdea's Webby Mobile, WinWAP, and WebViewer. As for mobile HTML transcoders here are some of the more popular mobile transcoding services: Yahoo OneSearch, Google, Mowser, PhoneFavs, Skweezer, Bomjpacket, Mobile Gateway, Compressr, and Mobleo.

What lies ahead?

Many people are doubtful about the future of mobile browsers. While mobile browsers have been around since the first iteration of WAP in the late 1990s, there still aren't that many people surfing the Web on their cell phones. Numerous wireless industry insiders don't think that portable devices are the perfect medium for Web browsing. They say that the future of the mobile Web lies not in browsers, but in clients for applications. Currently, clients and not browsers handle most of the success stories of the mobile Web. In addition, almost all types of mobile IM are done through clients.

This doesn't mean, however, that mobile browsers will be dead in the very near future. Of course, they will certainly have a place in mobile Web. But unlike the desktop Web, numerous wireless industry insiders are skeptic that most mobile applications will be used through browsers. They think that mobile browsers will not evolve as mini-versions of their desktop cousins, but will likely become more of a set of bookmarks.