All posts in the topic BlackBerry, Pocket PC, Mobile/Low Bandwidth View (Short link)
Summary
- There are 3 posts — by 3 authors — in this topic.
- Latest post made by Michael JasonSmith at Mar 24 21:44 UTC
The other day I helped someone from a foundation who I have monitoring some of
our forums via digest, see if the links worked on her BlackBerry.
They did, but loading was slow. I've noticed this too on my PocketPC. I think
part of the issue is that mobile browsers don't use compression and the
javascript/style sheet files are large.
Will it ever be viable to have a mobile style sheet that can skip the big
initial file (forums.e-democracy.org uploaded 113KB) and quickly snap up topics
for reading?
On Mon, 2008-03-24 at 09:54 -0500, Steven Clift wrote:
> Will it ever be viable to have a mobile style sheet that can skip the
> big initial file (forums.e-democracy.org uploaded 113KB) and quickly
> snap up topics for reading?
I guess this is a bit of a catch 22. We get *very* few mobile browsers,
thus it's not economically viable for us to expend effort on it, in
order to make it more viable for people to use mobile browsers. The idea
is good though.
It's actually pretty quick and usable on my mobile, but then it has a
decent web browser (Opera), and connects to 802.11abg wireless or decent
3g broadband.
We do think about the bandwidth used by the pages provided by
GroupServer. We try to keep the pages as light as practical, and try to
use progressive enhancement, so the pages are useful and usable even
while the CSS and JavaScript loads.
I often test the speed of OnlineGroups.Net, and GroupServer.Org, from
urban and rural dial-up lines. (The former is still around, albeit
becoming rare; the latter is the only way to easily and affordability
connect to the Internet.) The first page always takes a while to load,
as the CSS, images and JavaScript libraries are pulled down. However,
page is always useful and usable, so I can read the text while the page
loads. After the first page, the other pages load *very* quickly, thanks
to the browser-cache. I was comparing the speed of GroupServer to a
text-only Webmail system, and GroupServer was blitzing it!
I suspect that the browsing experience on a mobile platform may be as
influenced by the browser as the site. Just as you will never have a
truly satisfying browsing experience using Microsoft Internet Explorer 6
on a desktop, you will never have a good experience using a poor browser
on a mobile platform. Using Opera on a high-end Nokia would be quite
different experience to a low-end Windows PocketPC ☺
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