Comments on: Small Screen Testing in FireFox

By: charmedlover

charmedlover — Tue, 30 Nov 1999 00:00:00 +0000

Opera’s small screen rendering shows you what your site will look like in any mobile, as long as you provide a style sheet for it. As long as you have a proper style sheet it will be the same in each phone. A good tutorial on doing this is:

http://www.opera.com/products/mobile/dev/multiple/

I think that the Web Dev toolbar for Firefox has mobile viewing capabilities, but I’m not sure.

By: NikLP

NikLP — Tue, 30 Nov 1999 00:00:00 +0000

@Microsoft: pIE -> Trash please?

By: MonkeyG

MonkeyG — Tue, 30 Nov 1999 00:00:00 +0000

The Web Dev extension in firefox has the ability to alter the screen resolution to a custom size. I don't see any specific toll for Mobile rendering. If you don't have the web dev toolbar, you should get it by using this link:Firefox Web Dev Extension

It has been a tremendous help when developing for the web. (especially the auto-fill form tool!) :aparty:

By: AlexW

AlexW — Tue, 30 Nov 1999 00:00:00 +0000

Web Dev Toolbar has an option in it's 'CSS/Media Type' menu allowing you to view stylesheets marked as "media='handheld'".

Although 'Opera for Mobile' will honour that declaration, so few other handheld browsers will, that using that declaration is next to useless IMHO -- unless you were running an 'Opera for Mobile' forum perhaps. Opera is used in a fair percentage of Symbian OS phones, but I doubt it would be present in more than 5% of the total PDAs and Smartphones.

OpenWave and Nokia's Browser hold most of the market (as far as I can tell, anyway). They use their own non-standard rules to interpret code and CSS. As a general rule, they'll try to load almost ANY CSS they find, regardless of it's 'media' setting (screen/handheld/etc). Of the CSS they download, they'll render some of it, and make up the rest. What joy!

Ultimately, the browser-based are handy, but if you want to build seriously mobile-friendly apps, you need to test on the purpose-built emulators.

By: wombat23

wombat23 — Tue, 30 Nov 1999 00:00:00 +0000

Testing with mobile phones and their native browsers is the only way to a achieve a quality interface. Emulators, plug-ins, whatever - they are not representative of the end user experience. Trust me, I have been developing GUI for the latest Samsung, Motorola and SonyEricsson 3G devices, and also tested in a lot of older (2.5G) devices in Nokia, LG, etc.

Also, The whole notion of one xhtml document, many renditions is deeply problematic. To achieve a sophicticated interface that works across many mobile phones, you most liklely will need to implement presentation markup in both the xhtml and the css.

It all depends on how visually rich your GUI is and what devices you have available to test on / your target audience...

BTW - I'm available for project work come mid-September.