First serious stab at mobile browser grading

jQuery announced the jQuery mobile project, which aims at bringing jQuery to mobile browsers. All mobile browsers; not just Safari iPhone and Android WebKit.

Still, bringing the library to all mobile browsers is a rather tall order, since there are so bloody many of them. Therefore John Resig has spent a lot of time with mobile phones (I know all about that, so I admire his persistency) and has produced a first serious stab at mobile browser grading.

jQuery’s approach differs slightly from Yahoo!’s, in that it has A-, B-, C- and F-grade browsers.

A High Quality. A high quality browser with notable market share. A must-target for a mobile web developer. B Medium Quality. Either a lower quality browser with high market share or a high quality browser with low market share. Depending upon your capabilities you should work to support these browsers, as well. C Low Quality. Typically an extremely low quality browser with high market share. Generally not capable of running modern JavaScript or DOM code. F Failing. A barely-functioning browser. Even though it has some market share you should avoid developing for it completely.

Safari iPhone 3+, Android WebKit, Dolfin, Opera Mobile 10+, Symbian v5 (which I call Symbian WebKit 2), BlackBerry 6.0 (the WebKit-based one), Palm WebKit, Firefox, and the MeeGo MicroB browser (Gecko-based) are the A-graded ones, and I agree.

I hope other libraries will follow suit. In fact, Dojo and YUI are already doing so, although I’m not sure exactly where they are right now. (Pointers very welcome.) Ext.js has completely moved to mobile and has been renamed Sencha. My personal beef with Sencha is that they only support iPhone and Android; their examples do not work on Dolfin (Samsung bada), while that browser also supports the touch events. But that’ll change

Of course I fully support all these moves. My support will likely take the form of continuing to report on the mobile browsers and their odd quirks; that’s what I have been doing for the first generation of libraries, and that’s what they still need most.

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