IE Mobile on Windows Phone 7: Yes Brandon It’s Crippled
Earlier this month was one of my favorite weeks of the year, the Microsoft MVP Summit. If you are unaware of the MVP Summit it is basically a private conference Microsoft hosts in Bellevue/Redmond WA for MVP Award winners. For me it is a very intense week of learning, networking and direct interaction with product teams. The sessions’ content is usually a mix of NDA content and stuff everyone knows but with a highly armed firing squad aimed at the actual product managers and developers.
One session I attended was a standing room only, and I was one of those standing, Brandon Watson gave session on Windows Phone 7. Sadly everything he shared we all knew when we walked in the room. But he did open things up to Q&A. I was seriously contemplating asking about IE mobile and its crippled state. Then I looked to my right and Elijiah Mannor asked that very question! Brandon’s response, (loosely quoting) ‘It’s not crippled, it’s a great browser’.
Oh Brandon, wrong answer…
Touch Gestures
Simply put, they are missing! iPhone and Droid’s Webkit support touch events. I am not sure how you can even think about shipping a modern SmartPhone (which I think means multi-touch screen input is assumed) without a browser that supports touch gestures. If you are wondering there is a W3C Touch Event Specification you should be able to program against. Till then things like jQuery Mobile will just suck on the Windows Phone 7.
For the record, this is how jQuery Mobile looks on the Windows Phone 7. It should look much nicer, but lack of basic feature support prevents this. Not to mention the lack of touch gesture support means the framework turns off many of the features jQuery Mobile supports on modern smartphones.
Geolocation
Again, this is a requirement to just stay current with the marketplace and consumer demand. Geolocation is one of the hottest spaces right now. At least the new IE9 supports the W3C Geolocation specification, let’s hope WP7 will by Mango. Since the Foursquare native app sucks on WP7, maybe the FourSquare Playground will be the thing to do.
HTML5/CSS3
Ok I am going to give them some slack here, I mean Internet Explorer desktop got caught on this one. At least I know this is coming later this year. But again the IE7 engine was a bad place to start. And honestly this is the main reason why web developers look at the WP7 platform and just shrug. When we say IE6 must die we also mean IE7 must go down with it. Choosing that as your initial browser engine was a big Fail. Web Sockets, Web Storage and Offline Apps are also important.
Just comparing the Droid emulator’s browser to the Windows Phone 7 emulator browser using the Modernizer’s homepage tells the tale. Droid supports just about all the HTML5/CSS3 specifications including video and canvas. IE7+ on Windows Phone 7, well it supports nothing, nada, zip, you are stuck in the 4 years ago web.
Camera Access
Say What? Why would I really want access to the phone’s camera? I can think why. Its so easy to take a photo and upload to a myriad of sites like TwitPic, Flickr and People of Walmart right through the browser. No native application needed. Again I am aware the iPhone has this capability, I am not sure about Droid. And yes there is a Media Capture W3C Specification in case you were wondering.
Contacts API
With the People Hub built into the phone this would be a great specification to implement. Here is the W3C Contacts API Specification. With the coming proliferation of microformating this could be a very powerful way to interact with the people hub. Just think about storing contact information right from a web page to your hub. I see it as a big convenience in today’s highly social world.
Accelerometer
Oh how much fun this could be, especially when creating games! The W3C Device Orientation Specification.
Summary
Support for native applications is one thing, but I personally believe having top notch support for the current web standards on the smartphone is the best way to attract customers. The browser is the most used application on the smart phone, followed by e-mail. The rest are in the dust when it comes to actual usage.
Consumers have continued to complain about the mobile web experience because the experience generally sucks. Yes part of the blame lies squarely on the shoulders of the web development world and business decision makers. We have to make a better push to create stunning mobile web experiences. In fact they don’t really have to be stunning, just useful, and help solve customer problems/needs quickly with minimal friction.
Right now Microsoft is not giving web developers a fighting chance on the Windows Phone 7 platform. So I hope this serves as a wake up notice to the Internet Explorer Mobile team to get things in place before Mango. I WANT THIS TO WORK, YOU HAVE AN ENTIRE ECOSYSTEM OF WEB DEVELOPERS ANXIOUS FOR THIS TO WORK!!! Please listen to us and give us a mobile browser that is not stuck 3-4 years behind the trends.