Mobile web browsers are the first point of call for internet users in developing countries in Asia and Africa, truly giving people means to live and connect with family and business contacts. The mobile is also the first internet experience for many handset owners in India. There is a deeper penetration of the internet using mobile than desktop in these continents.

Fact: 306 Million mobile users in India 2008, with 610 million in 2012.

Mozilla’s main competitor will be Opera Mini, “the world’s most popular mobile Web browser with over 20 million users”. In some countries Opera mini is shipped on handsets; this will only increase in the next 12 months.

People’s desire to access the internet using a mobile is increasing, but can the infrastructure cope with this demand? We need to be sure before the “flood gates” open and the innovation increases.

It is very early days for Mozilla’s Fennec. As with most alpha releases, and being open sourced, it means that testers and developers will contribute ideas, bugs and fixes to the latest version.

View a video featuring a quick introduction to Fennec Alpha 2 Overview .

Being in alpha stage, it’s intended as an early developer release of the mobile version of Firefox, for testing purposes only, intended to:

• get wider community feedback on our approach to the user experience
• engage Mozilla community teams, including localizers, add-on developers, and testers
• get feedback from Web developers

The focus of development so far has been on building a new user interface that reflects Firefox’s design principles, and adds touch screen support and other features that are appropriate for mobile phones and other handheld devices.

Download the latest build of Fennec here – www.mozilla.org/projects/fennec/

What does this mean for iPhone users?

Apple’s SDK restrictions means that browsers running scripting languages will not be allowed, and not on Android either. Currently this is the only way that Firefox will work on the iPhone.

In other browser news, Opera has demonstrated Opera Turbo at Mobile World Congress, showing up to 3.5 times faster than other browsers not using the turbo technique. Users will experience faster page downloads because Opera Turbo generates less HTTP requests. Each request introduces a lot of latency, which is a common problem with mobile networks. Read the full article here

This article at Business Insider describes recent browsers allowed on the App Store. The update section explains that they’re all Webkit-based.

So while Apple now seems to be allowing apps that are marketed as browsers, there’s still no evidence they’ll let in other browsers like Firefox, which use competing browser engines – a key technical difference. So we still don’t know if they’d allow other browser flavors, or browsers with add-ons built in like Adobe Flash. The consensus from commenters seems to be “probably not.”

[Update from Matt: Mozilla has joined the Electronic Frontier Foundation in fighting for jailbreak iPhone users to install non-Apple approved third-party apps]

Of course, now there are plenty that appear on delicious or digg. However, one I keep sending colleagues to is over at ‘Woork’: Tips to design your site for mobile devices.

It has the easiest to follow steps showing how to get your carefully hand coded web pages to work seamlessly on mobile devices, such as the iPhone.

The online tutorial covers choosing an URL address for your mobile site version, using a redirect script for mobile devices, designing a mobile-friendly layout using CSS and XHTML with code that you can copy that will let you explore the beginnings of mobile web development in no time at all.

Desktop versions of web sites can have multi-tiered menus, multiple columns and fixed width layouts, but this isn’t always desired in the mobilised version.

For example, compare the Facebook desktop site to the iPhone version. The mobile experience for social networking or news sites is about getting content delivered to your users ‘on the go’, using a stripped down version only with the main modules of the site content, for example ‘status updates’ or news headlines only. This delivers an optimised experience for their mobile internet device, and always keeps the users in mind.

Google has a fantastic range of its services on mobile now. Below is a screenshot of the mobile interface when you are signed into your account. As ever, Google’s minimalist interface design works well on the mobile – quick to load and easy to scan.

Looking ahead, 2009 will be the biggest year for mobile web usage to date. Smashing Magazine has listed the Mobile Web Design Trends For 2009, and highlights some good examples of popular sites that do the conversion to mobile well. With the explosion in phones that have much more capable web browsers, the limelight will move away from designing iPhone-specific sites, to standards-driven sites that can adapt to a variety of small-screen devices.

I hope to be able to delve into best practice for mobile web development in the next few posts. Stay tuned, and let me know if you have any questions on any of the details here.

http://www.createwithcontext.com/landing-iphone.html

And on Slideshare.

The big news Monday at Apple’s Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC) in San Francisco was of course CEO Steve Jobs’ announcement of a 3G version of the iPhone.

So, the speculation of many bloggers and news channels has been replaced by the hard facts of the iPhone release. US and UK customers will be able to get the new phone from July 11th. Callender Creates provide the need to know facts from the WWDC.

From my point of view, the announcements all focused on iPhone applications and web technologies the iPhone can now handle, with faster speeds. We will see how 02 handle this one before making promises

There were many comments on the blogosphere for their own personal requirements, like a bigger camera, video and more battery life. Not much to shout about here, however, the fact that they have pushed for GPS is a large step into geographical (geo) based web applications. Apple have been working with Skyhook Wireless for the last few years on location based services:

Skyhook created the first Wi-Fi Positioning System (WPS), the world’s first location platform to use the native 802.11 radio already on mobile devices to deliver accurate positioning worldwide.

This is exciting stuff, with GPS the future of these apps can only improve with specific results depending on factors such as your location, likes and contacts:

• Local Search – Krillion
• Location Based Gaming – Geocaching.com
• Location Sharing – Yahoo! Fire Eagle
• Social Discovery – Whrrl

Furthering the idea of the ‘web on the move’ – providing lightweight, personalised web sites that customise results and content for you – Irish Blogger Paul Walsh, has thoughts on the impact of the iPhone on the development community.

One of the finer points worth digging deeper into from Monday morning’s Apple news out of the WWDC is the company’s new workaround to notifications from third-party apps in the latest iPhone system software – Apple’s new notification system.

So in conclusion, a solid announcement from Apple, perhaps not as far as everyone had hoped, but it wasn’t going to be as large as the iPhone’s first release.

Back in the 90s, mobile development began with WAP sites consisting of a collection of “cards” making up a site. You were limited to wap images (*.wbmp) and very limited user client side interaction with the browser. See Wap Basics at W3C for more details.

Now, high profile sites that you can visit on browsers such as Symbian’s (Webkit-based) browser or iPhone’s Safari are based on current web standards used by desktop computers, and often written in XHTML (eXtensible Hyper Text Markup Language). However, we can now target for these handsets and for older phone models using the magic of CSS. The CSS file specifically targets mobile browsers, the CSS tells the browser how the layout and presentation is ordered.

Not all sites are written in XHTML (for example, PHP and Java-driven sites), but the backbone that is interpreted by browsers in still HTML and CSS. It’s the way which we tell the browser which CSS file to use that makes the difference – making either the site display as normal or customising the user experience with a mobile specific CSS file using the following line of code.

<link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" media="handheld" href="mobile.css" />

To target the iPhone specifically with CSS use:

<!--[if !IE]>-->
<link media="only screen and (max-device-width: 480px)"
    href="iPhone.css" type="text/css" rel="stylesheet" />
<!--<![endif]-->

This is where the CSS best practice comes in for delivering web content to mobile devices. The principal objective is to improve the user experience of the web when accessed from such devices.

The recommendations refer to delivered content and not to the processes by which it is created, nor to the devices or user agents to which it is delivered.

The differences in coding the Mobile Web

Opera’s developer relations manager Chris Mills – who I recently met recently at SxSw 2008 – has written an article over at thinkvitamin.com, focusing on the “do’s, don’ts and best practices” of mobile web development. He looks at different approaches to mobile development problems, and how the mobile web differs from the normal web. As with other popular tech blogs, the comments are just as valuable in reading as the original post.

Chris’ article makes real sense when you look at a two-part article by Icelandik Mobile and Microformats Guru, Brian Suda. In “Designing and Developing mobile web sites in the real world“, Brian focuses on the audience being the key factor for making mobile sites. Someone browsing your mobile site has very different needs and expectations from a desktop customer.

The Future is in your Pocket

Mobile development is still in its early days, and a long way from being standardised. However, if you give mobile the same thought and approach as building accessible and sematic desktop-based online applications, you will be future-proofing your work.

A great article for iPhone development is on A List Apart. It explains step-by-step the considerations for web development methods targeted at the iPhone, but many of the ideas and concepts presented can be useful and effective with other mobile devices.

In the future articles, I will be looking at mobile development events you can get along to, as well as the individuals leading the way in iphone web development.