Skweezer has just been updated this evening. For one thing, the home page is quite different. After quite a bit of customer feedback, we’ve backed down from the one-size-fits-all mentality and have left one interface for phones and another for everyone else. The major change is to put the “Skweeze” box back on the home page, which can be used to start browsing or searching.
Another change we’ve made is to de-emphasize the mobile versions of websites, again due to feedback. Mobile purists have argued that if there’s a mobile version of a desktop website, that should be front and center on the mobile device. Mobile versions often have severely reduced functionality, however. That’s why as of today, the mobile version (if we know about it) becomes a link at the top of the page, on par with RSS links. Furthermore, for those sites that force users to view the mobile version based on browser detection (USAToday.com is one example), we’ve given our users the option to appear as a desktop browser if they so choose, by selecting the new “Identify as desktop computer” checkbox in their preferences.
Skweezers appears better on the iPhone in this release, now that we’re constraining the page “viewport” width to 320 pixels using a meta tag.
Finally, it seems that some sites simply don’t support JavaScript-less browsers, most notably PayPal’s desktop version. We are experimenting with a subset of our users to allow JavaScript back in Skweezer, and we plan to detect and expand JavaScript and CSS rendering in the future.
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