Mobile Browser Testing
Thursday, August 9th, 2007Andrea has a post about mobile device testing up on the dotMobi blog. If I understand correctly he’s talking in this case about an Acid2 style set of tests for mobile browsers in particular. Would certainly be nice to have a baseline set of compatibility metrics for different features across the various browser types and handsets. I’ve fooled around with testing Javascript capabilities myself.
Like he mentions however, the problem isn’t just support of the browser for certain capabilities but also the environment it goes into. Network differences, different gateway behavior, different default configuration settings or build options on different carriers, etc. Look to support for cookies as one example, as described in the wireless faq. Most modern mobile browsers support cookies, definitely. But some carriers ship with the option to accept cookies turned off, most likely to be true if their own internal portal doesn’t require the feature. And others have gateways that strip out cookies completely, or if the content site isn’t on a whitelist of trusted partners.
It seems like it would be very difficult to try to collect, organize, and present the info based on all the different dimensions it can have. Of course, I hope they can figure it out, it would be a killer resource to have! Very interested to see how this develops.
