Tag Archives: iPhone

The Future of The Mobile Web

Posted by on August 1, 2007 2 comments

In his article The Analyst, The iPhone, And The Future Of The Mobile Web, Dan Frommer recaps a discussion regarding the pros/cons of iPhone-style powerful mobile browsers that access anything which “signals the beginning of the end for the mobile Web as we know it today” vs. the utility of mobile-specific websites. After conceding that mobile browsers suck, he goes on (emphasis added):

But even if someday everyone has a browser as powerful as the iPhone’s Safari, that doesn’t fix the screen-size problem [...] even if developers use proper Web coding standards, “normal” Web sites will always be crippled on iPhones and similar mobile devices.

Anyone who has used the iPhone on AT&T’s pokey EDGE data connection also knows that the bandwidth just isn’t there yet to browse hi-fi Web sites and actually enjoy it. And for the foreseeable future, there are things you can do with a computer that you simply can’t do with phones, such as hovering a mouse cursor over part of a Web site, browsing with Java-based navigation, right-clicking on links and elegantly using multiple browser windows.

The near future of the Internet is going to look a lot like it did in the last decade, when content creators made separate sites for broadband and dialup users. The “real” Web will continue to get more and more multimedia-heavy, with Java, Flash, and video offerings designed for broadband connections. And the mobile Web should continue as a separate entity, accounting for smaller displays, and focusing on faster-loading, lo-fi content and simple navigation with fat fingers in mind.

Live long and prosperI sadly agree that is what will probably happen for large corporate sites or web-only businesses (like Facebook), but I would like to add that Skweezer will bridge the gap for the rest of the web which I believe will remain in the majority. Anyone who thinks there will be both desktop and mobile versions of every site is deluding themselves. Remember the early days of Firefox when IE-specific sites would warn you to download IE in order to log in? Few sites responded with separate versions (or even separate stylesheets) for each browser, but the standard accepted practice is to make your site work on all major browsers. By using good web standards, XHTML and CSS and graceful fallbacks (like specifying onclick AND href for your A tags), web authors can be sure their sites will live long and prosper.

Minor Skweezer update today

Posted by on July 18, 2007 Comments Off

Skweezer LogoSkweezer 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.

Seriously, it works: Skweezer makes EDGE faster

Posted by on July 9, 2007 Comments Off

Fast iPhoneAn anonymous commenter left the following message on our feedback form the other day:

Just bought an iPhone and have been very disappointed with the slow speed of the Internet on Edge.
Your site compressed a 50 second navigation down to 10 seconds on a favorite web site.
Unbelievable ! ! !
Thanks for an outstanding tool ! ! !

The user agent and IP address indicates this person left the comment via the iPhone itself. This is incredibly gratifying for us to read. Skweezer makes ordinary websites much faster on the iPhone on EDGE or any phone on any network, no lie. It’s like a free speed upgrade to the EDGE network. I can’t wait to unleash our new upgrades to Skweezing technology which will compress web pages to an astounding degree, up from just unbelievable.

How to make your EDGE connection 4.7 times faster

Posted by on July 3, 2007 1 comment

I just saw Jeff Atwood’s entry from last week on why you don’t want an iPhone, and his well-reasoned advice boils down to this: EDGE is painfully slow compared to 3G, and you should wait until they iron out the bugs in v2.0. For these reasons, even the Apple faithful are sitting v1.0 out. Sprint is obviously thrilled right now.

As far as I can figure, the difference between EDGE and 3G networks like EVDO is presently 4-5x, accounting for the recent boost. There is a free and easy way to get 4-5x faster downloads on any network, even EDGE: Skweezer. Because content is pre-compressed on our servers before it even starts down the thin invisible tube to your phone, there’s less overall data transmitted, which translates into a faster browsing experience. It is the equivalent of turning your 200 kbit connection into a 1 mbit connection. Basic web surfing will be loads faster with Skweezer than without.

You still don’t believe me? It’s been a while since we did a site comparison, so I ran a few sites through Firebug this evening (July 3, 2007) to compare their total original page weight with the Skweezed versions, with images on and off. Unfortunately the figures aren’t as dramatic as they once were because server-side content compression (gzip and deflate) is more commonplace now, and that used to be an easy win for us. Nevertheless, Skweezer still always brought the page weight down, as follows:

Page size comparison

The worst value in each column is in red, and the best value is green. The fastest way to browse is without images, but that’s only useful if you’re just information hunting. Even with images on, the median speedup for browsing sites through Skweezer was 4.7 x, if we assume that the network is the main bottleneck. If you want to run your own tests, be aware that IE reports uncompressed page size in the page properties dialog, while Firefox reports the number of bytes received for the main HTML document, reflecting compression. The best way to compare total page weight accurately is to use a tool like Firebug or a proxy like Fiddler2.

iPhone Slowness: Obviously No Workaround is Possible

Posted by on June 28, 2007 Comments Off

iphone_jobs.jpgNot to harp, but I’ve enjoyed reading one particular aspect of the conversation surrounding the most anticipated phone of the year, as follows:

A Trade-Off on iPhone Data Speed (John Markoff, NYT): “On the eve of the Apple iPhone’s debut, the top executives of Apple and AT&T today defended their decision to rely upon AT&T’s slow Edge wireless data network, rather than a faster network that is less widely available. Early reviews of the iPhone, while positive, have faulted the slower network because it will limit the palm-sized wireless computer’s utility in making the Internet easily accessible on the go.”

iPhone Blindness (Scott Karp, Publishing 2.0): “Buying an iPhone is like buying a MacBook that only supports dial-up access. [...] How can iPhone reviewers tout the web browser as the “real dazzler” and the “closest thing to the real Internet” when it crawls along like a 1400 baud modem?”

iPhone ‘Surfing’ On AT&T Network Isn’t Fast, Jobs Concedes (WSJ): “Mr. Jobs acknowledged that the company’s new iPhone won’t surf the Internet as fast as he would like on the network, called ‘Edge,’ but added that the device’s ability to connect to Wi-Fi hotspots would give consumers a speedier alternative for Web browsing.”

I think it’s clear that the reviewers equate the utility of mobile browsing with speed. If only there were some free mobile proxy web service that would compensate for the EDGE network’s lower speed without requiring a download and installation. I guess we’ll just have to wait until some enterprising company builds such a thing, or we could wait until all of our favorite websites make cunning little mobile versions. Until then, nobody should buy an iPhone, or any other AT&T phones that surf the so-called mobile Internet! That will teach them.

Opera Mini vs. iPhone – huh?

Posted by on June 19, 2007 1 comment

(The title of this post could also be: Opera Stole Our Version Number! But we don’t have the number 4 trademarked, so we’ll let it slide.)

Opera logoToday Opera announced the beta of v4 of their mobile browser, which I am downloading and trying out. There are all sorts of cool things you can do when you have both client software and server optimizing, and Opera is pushing the state-of-the-art here. Our mobile web optimizing software, Skweezer, is a server-only solution, so we are limited to the things your built-in browser can do. Anyway, I was interested to see some bloggers/journalists (and even Opera themselves) pitting Opera Mini vs. the iPhone (thanks to TechMeme for this list):

As has been pointed out elsewhere: where’s the sense in comparing software to hardware? I call sour grapes on Opera’s part. You won’t be able to install Opera Mini on the iPhone, at least not right away, even though you could even install Opera on your desktop, phone, Wii, toaster, and slow-moving household pets. Your goal to install Opera on everything you love will be thwarted by Apple. So I believe Opera’s message here is: you don’t need an iPhone when you can have the mobile web on your crummy old phone right now! To which I reply: you don’t need client software, you can have a server-side web optimizer that works with iPhone’s Safari browser and your crummy old phone’s built in browser right now, no download! It’s called Skweezer, and we just updated it to version 4, which seems to be the right number for mobile web browsing products released in the summer of 2007.

The iPhone Might Be Slow and Closed – Awesome

Posted by on June 19, 2007 2 comments

Steve Jobs iPhoneThere has been some complaining about the iPhone’s reliance on AT&T’s EDGE network. Here’s an example from Forbes.com, in sidebar to the article “Why You May Not Want an iPhone“:

The iPhone isn’t equipped for AT&T’s fastest “third-generation” (or 3G) wireless data network. Instead, iPhone users are stuck on an older, slower network, which means Web pages will take longer to load.

Also, since the non-announcement at the WWDC that Apple’s idea of 3rd-party applications is “sites that run on Safari”, there has been additional kvetching. I sympathize with everyone whose software does not translate to the web service model.

However, as a developer who makes a web service that speeds up browsing for mobile devices and doesn’t require a client installation of any kind, I couldn’t be happier about the iPhone design “restrictions”: it validates our approach completely. For the record: Skweezer addresses iPhone slowness without requiring any client installation. So while you’re waiting for Opera for the iPhone, give us a try first. And by the way, we just released Skweezer v4.0 which compresses images too, just in time. Welcome to Skweezer, iPhone people. Enjoy the entire internet.

AT&T or Apple folks: could I have one for testing, please? I’m already a Cingular/AT&T customer. You may already know the Kendall family from my wife’s addiction to the iTunes music store.