Testing on mobile sites

Mobile
1

In terms of mobile devices, I only have an iPhone which, of course, has very good CSS/JavaScript support.

So, how do you test on mobile sites—on all the various versions of Blackberry, Android, Windows Mobile, etc? My gut answer is: you can’t. Or at least it is not realistic to do so for freelancers. So, just make sure it works without JavaScript and accept that on more limited devices some CSS features won’t be supported and therefore the layout won’t be perfect. Is this what everyone else does?

Secondly, is there anywhere to find a reference guide as to the support of CSS, JavaScript and JQuery on smart phones?

2

Yeah, not an easy issue. There are some tools that sort of help, but none that are really great, except the iPhone/iPad simulator (as part of the Apple developer kit if you’re on a Mac) and perhaps the Android Developer Kit.

A few other options that could be of some use:

Mobilizer is a nice desktop app that emulates iPhone, Android, Blackberry and Palm Pre.
Opera Mini: http://www.opera.com/mini/demo/ (online Opera testing tool)
Opera’s Mobile Emulator
You can also take srceen shots of any mobile using the free Mobilito service.
And there is also the dotMobi emulator for simpler devices.

For the most part, I just cross my fingers and hope for the best. With all these devices, I figure the pressure is on the manufacturers to get it right, as people will turn away from their devices if their rendering of web pages is lousy.

3

Amen to that!

Most of the blogs I read about JQuery not working, etc are a few years old now. I’m guessing most smart phones are pretty good these days.

And thank you for the reply and links.

4

That’s the impression I get, and lots are running on Android, I believe, which seems pretty good. As for Windows Mobile, I don’t know much about it, but I assume (because of its name alone) that it’s a mess. :eyebrow:

5

I test on iphone4 and some android phone assuming the best for everything else unless I hear otherwise.

All modern web capable phones support CSS and JavaScript. However, both can be turned off no different than a desktop.

6

You can debug during development with Google Chrome’s tool, Javascript Console. Then, once it’s on the device, use Weinre (Web Inspector Remote) to debug the device, that is, use the Javascript Console of Weinre on the desktop to monitor the device remotely. Same familiar tools!

I’ve just finished a thorough step-by-step tutorial for newbies on how to set this up and will be putting it on my blog soon at http://iphonedevlog.wordpress.com/.

Weinre works for debugging Webkit browsers, like Google Chrome and Safari on the Android and iOS devices.

7

I would look at usage statistics. Android is now about 50% of the market, iOS is about 25%. Blackberry is fading fast as we all know. So I’d make sure you’re working in the big two.