Talk:Mobile browser

Requested move
Fdavis99 17:49, 28 July 2007 (UTC) Disscuss renaming "Microbrowser" to "Mobile browser"
 * Support if mobile browser really is the more common term (I've never heard of "microbrowser" but I have heard of a "mobile browser") then it should be renamed. This article seems like it's perpetuating the name by virtue of existing, it is the top result for Microbrowser on Google. Unless someone objects I'm going to move the page soon. -- Gudeldar 03:04, 2 August 2007 (UTC)

This article has been renamed as the result of a move request. --Stemonitis 07:01, 3 August 2007 (UTC)


 * Just a note about the evolution of the terms

I was involved in writing browsers for phones in the very early days. Microbrowser is a historical term and was what we used to call browsers on phones back in the 90s and into the early 00s. They were designed when such platforms had extremely limited resources (8MHz CPU and <128KB RAM was not uncommon) and could not hope to run the same code which desktop browsers were using. Almost all of the old microbrowser platforms would have been built with proprietary engines.

IMO the 'Mobile Browser' we have now is a different thing. Today's mobile browser is different from a desktop browser only in the UI and the user agent strings. Otherwise, they almost all support the same set of W3C specs and features. Mobile hardware is now sufficiently advanced that we largely run the same code on them that we do on desktop systems. Certainly this is the case for Android, iOS, Palm, BB & Symbian. In that environment, mobile browsing as a separate topic to web browsing is becoming a pointless distinction (apart for historical information) and should probably eventually be combined with the general article about web browsing. Mobile browsers are anyway largely consolidating around the same engines that desktop browsers are using, excepting Opera Mini and arguably the use of compressing web proxies for browsers such as the new Amazon Fire browser. Perhaps compressing web proxies used for bandwidth and CPU reduction on the client end ought to be discussed along with other proxy technology.

Since a lot of the pioneering companies no longer exist and those that do no longer support or sell their old system, it's very hard to dig up information on them nowadays and we ought to retain some of the history captured here during the times when such companies did exist.

It would be nice to have a better structured article with 'history of browsing on mobile devices' clearly separate from what is effectively 'current state of browsing on mobile devices' which is not so different from 'current state of browsing'.

217.140.96.21 (talk) 10:50, 5 January 2012 (UTC)

FOSS and NPOV
In the browser table, why does FOSS=yes mean green (connotation: good/safe) and FOSS=no mean red (connotation: bad, warning) ?

Personally I prefer FOSS... BUT, that is not objective - it is an opinion. In the interests of NPOV this colour-scheme should be removed.

For me you could scrap the whole column, which anyway overlaps with "Software license". 92.42.225.141 (talk) 16:26, 13 October 2009 (UTC)

I made the thing without colors so it wouldn't connote good thing or bad thing, just a relative choice.--Rafaelluik (talk) 20:09, 8 May 2011 (UTC)

"First true microbrowser"
What does "true" mean here? The article says that NetHopper was the first microbrowser, but in reality it was PocketWeb (then called NewtonWWW), also for the Newton platform. HorvatM 17:17, 7 February 2010 (UTC) —Preceding unsigned comment added by HorvatM (talk • contribs)
 * The NetHopper may be the first mobile browser available as a product, but it is not the first browser. Perhaps that is what is meant with "true"? — Preceding unsigned comment added by Dawooga (talk • contribs) 14:00, 9 December 2010 (UTC)
 * Yeah, we need def. more reasearch in this area. Feel free to help me with my stale draft at User:mabdul/Microsoft Mobile Explorer to getting live. mabdul 13:51, 6 January 2012 (UTC)

"License"
While browser applications might be closed source, many browser engines (what really matter) are not which makes the license column very confusing. BlackBerry's old engine is closed source, its new one is open source is a good example. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 208.65.73.200 (talk) 16:44, 28 December 2010 (UTC)


 * The list of browsers is a list of browser applications, and each field therefore relates to the applications and not to the engine (which is another field, and therefore redundant). I'm not sure why the average reader, who is a user and not a developer, would consider the engine license to be more important than the application license. Ham Pastrami (talk) 03:27, 10 January 2011 (UTC)

Mobile page
I understand many Web pages, including articles in Wikipedia, have a "Mobile" version especially designed for the small screen and slow access of a mobile phone and presented by default after automatically identifying the browser as mobile. Where is the Wikipedia article about that? Jim.henderson (talk) 12:56, 22 February 2011 (UTC)
 * Why do we need an extra article about that? It should be explained in here why Wikipedia and other sites are doing this... mabdul 13:51, 6 January 2012 (UTC)

Additional User Installable Browser Suggestions
You should consider including Puffin in the list of user installable browsers. It runs on IOS and Android and it is seriously FAST at rendering - even rendering big Flash files on older smart phones. You can find them here - http://www.puffinbrowser.com/ if you need more info. I think they're in rev 2.0 right now but until I find out something horrible about it, its the best mobile browser I've used. It even lets my kool-aid drinking Apple brethren commit the heresy of playing Flash.

129.119.81.135 (talk) 23:53, 25 September 2012 (UTC)Lisa Simpson129.119.81.135 (talk) 23:53, 25 September 2012 (UTC)

Atomic Browser?
No mention of the Atomic Web Browser for iOS? It's pretty popular. Should be listed. www.atomicwebbrowser.com — Preceding unsigned comment added by 152.17.125.32 (talk) 17:23, 5 February 2013 (UTC)

Phone number for pmlightinthebox
I would like phone number for lightinthebox 2600:6C44:217F:ED33:9CBF:1188:B908:C4AB (talk) 23:59, 22 April 2022 (UTC)
 * Sorry, this is not an information desk. Talk pages are only for discussing improvements to the associated article. Largoplazo (talk) 00:06, 23 April 2022 (UTC)

Propose splitting into History of mobile browsers and List of mobile browsers
Right now this article is in a bit of an interesting state—the prose content mostly covers pre-smartphone era mobile web browsers, while the Popular Mobile Browsers section is essentially a list of mobile browsers running on smartphone platforms (List of mobile browsers redirects to it, as well). Meanwhile Web browser doesn't have any content about phone browsers at all. I propose splitting this article up as follows:
 * Move prose content to a new page, History of mobile browsers (or maybe "mobile browsing," no strong preference). This page can be expanded with more content and I can clean up the prose here a bit.
 * Move the list content to List of mobile browsers removing the non-notable ones (Aloha and Polaris, as far as I can tell) to give us a notability-only WP:CSC. ( inclusion criteria will be discussed separately )
 * Expand Web browser to have a section on mobile browsers, with a see also hatnote of the new History of mobile browsers page. Redirect Mobile browser to go there first.

It's clear to me all of these topics are notable (and important!), and I think this composition will work better for organizing the information. Anyone have thoughts or concerns here? Dylnuge (Talk • Edits) 21:46, 5 November 2022 (UTC)


 * I'm not sure about the split yet.


 * All browsers that are named, should be kept. I'll count a browser as non-notable, if it's no longer maintained, and not available for major mobile platforms, such as Android/iOS. Opera and Opera Mini are notable. Notable are also all browsers that originate from countries that are not democracies, as privacy-conscious users have the right to be aware about these in order to avoid using and installing them. The non-maintained item should then be moved into the proposed history page. This would prevent loss of information, and would keep the new page current. - Mardus /talk 00:03, 6 November 2022 (UTC)
 * Never suggested that Opera wasn't notable, it definitely is. Notable are also all browsers that originate from countries that are not democracies, as privacy-conscious users have the right to be aware about these in order to avoid using and installing them strikes me as running a bit afoul of WP:NOTGUIDE, not to mention being politically contentious (it's also certainly not WP:NSOFT, but I get that "notable" here is meant to mean "worthy of inclusion on a list" and not "meets standards for article notability"). If a product isn't otherwise noteworthy I don't think it merits mention on Wikipedia just because some users might be suspicious of its country of origin. This is an encyclopedia, not VirusTotal. (It also strikes me a little WP:BEANS if your goal is to mention them so people avoid them; is there actually anyone who is thinking "I'm going to install this, but first I'll check Wikipedia (and nowhere else)" as opposed to "I saw this on Wikipedia, maybe I'll install it"?)
 * At any rate, it seems like my proposal to introduce a stricter inclusion criteria isn't unobjectionable, so it definitely merits further discussion. I'll amend this proposal to just be the split; the list can be kept as is for the moment and inclusion criteria can be discussed separately. Dylnuge  (Talk • Edits) 19:03, 6 November 2022 (UTC)


 * Support moving out the list to List of mobile browsers. The section at Web browser can be created independently, and not necessarily as part of the split. I would prefer to the history to continue to be here, unless if gets really long. Jay  💬 12:17, 5 December 2022 (UTC)
 * Since the list is quite long, would it be more useful to have 2 lists, e.g. Current mobile browsers and Historical mobile browsers? I recognize this would require more maintenance: deciding when to move a browser when it is no longer in use. A possible criterion for moving to the historical list: the browser cannot function today, e.g. a proxy browser that is no longer supported. Another could be if it runs only on devices that use obsolete network technologies. Maybe this is more work than the value it would provide. Perhaps a simpler solution would be a column with a mark to indicate obsolete / unsupported / dead? Fdavis99 (talk) 23:12, 15 December 2022 (UTC)
 * Are you proposing two separate list articles, or two sections of lists within the current article? Whether it is two different lists or a column in the table, a decision can be taken once we move out the existing list to a List of mobile browsers. Jay  💬 19:55, 16 December 2022 (UTC)
 * Question: Would splitting not be a hassle when you can get all the information in one place? A split is to what benefit? The size of the article doesn't appear to have been a problem. Javan009 (talk) 19:20, 6 April 2023 (UTC)
 * My original proposal here was a WP:CONTENTSPLIT, not a WP:SIZESPLIT. At the time I proposed it, the prose contents of the article almost exclusively described pre-2007 mobile browser technology, when mobile and desktop browsers were far more distinct software than they are today. My concern was that the list of modern mobile browsers and the prose describing HDML, WML, and XHTML WP browsers were distinct (but similarly termed) topics. Since then the article has been improved (huge thanks to the editors who did so).
 * I still think the list is probably overly exhaustive for the topic (I imagine a fully realized version of this article would look closer to what we have at Web browser now) but I concur with Jay above that we should not move the history contents to a separate page, especially with the incorporated improvements. Dylnuge  (Talk • Edits) 16:04, 27 April 2023 (UTC)