Via PM… and, well… I had a bit of a revelation given who I was talking to.
We were discussing old pre webkit phones; blazer, Opera mini and the like… For the most part Opera Mini/Mobile isn’t that hard to deal with, but older web enabled phones are a train wreck… Blazer, Mango, Netfront – no matter what you do or how you build the page, they suck; BAD… They suck to support, they suck to use, and they are the ENTIRE reason Opera mini was the bulldog on the block until webkit came along for droid and iOS.
Yet… as outdated and backwards as they are, you’ll hear accessibility and usability experts run their mouths about supporting them – you’ll see developers sweating supporting them nonstop…
When it hit me… and I asked the question: “Do you still support IE6 on your new pages?” – his response was “Of course not”…
Now, while I still do to the extent my pages will still WORK, they just won’t be as pretty or feature filled… The majority of developers have given IE6 the finger and told Microsoft where to shove said finger… when IE6 is still around 6% of visitors.
It’s hard to come up with a ratio of mobile to desktop or to relate the two, but if you go by OS use about a quarter of what’s in use online is mobile… In mobile browsers if we go by netmarketshare’s numbers:
Safari is 64%, Android is 19%, Opera Mini/mobile is 12%… that only leaves 5% free for everything else…
Which means that outdated mobile devices are not as common as IE6 users.
Also, droid capable devices are now well below the $100 mark in terms of tablets and phones, to the point where they cost less than what the cheapest ‘with plan’ phone did five years ago.
Now, I’m usually NOT one for using the statistics defense for saying to blazes with users; but if you are out there saying “who cares about IE6” and are then spending time worrying about anything less than Opera Mini…
Take a deep breath, and do a bit of introspection.
IMHO, as of right now supporting on Mobile anything less capable than webkit other than Opera Mini/Mobile is the same thing as supporting IE6.
Have fun thinking about that.