Counterproductive Mobile Web Sites.

More and more Web sites are pretending to be mobile Web apps when they are not. Worse, these so-called "mobile" sites often provide limited functionality compared to what would otherwise be delivered for PCs (and Macs).

Meanwhile, mobile Web browsers, such as MobileSafari for iOS, or Chrome for Android, are capable of fully supporting and easily interacting with those Web sites that appear on PCs. However, Web site developers instead make sites that cripple the browsers' capabilities and perform less functions on mobile platforms, in an attempt to make things appear to work better on your mobile device.

And that leaves visitors in a disadvantage, because people who visit sites with mobile devices, including iPad, will not be able to see or do what they could otherwise do on their PCs, making these devices not so useful for surfing the Web with, and undoing all of the hard work that mobile operating systems vendors put in to making mobile devices work in a ubiquitous world.

When Apple decided to extend iPhone OS (as it was called then) using Web Apps, the intent was for developers to make applications for iPhone using Web technologies but are deployed as icons that are downloaded from the Web and are launched from SpringBoard (the Home screen in iPhone OS) by tapping on its icon after it is installed. However, many developers bypass this feature entirely and make a half-baked solution by just concentrating on making the Web sites that are accessible through MobileSafari instead of developing them as the Web Apps that Apple initially proposed.

While these sites would have the same features as Web App versions of the same thing, the sites impose two limitations than what Web Apps are expected to be:

• users know that they are launched through MobileSafari and still appear as a Web site rather than have the appearance and behaviour of a Web App, and
• these sites often override full-featured versions intended for PCs because the sites are designed to only feature the "mobile" version of the site to MobileSafari users, thus preventing MobileSafari from offering regular browser features for users who expect to zoom, resize, scroll, select and otherwise interact with the Web site like any other for desktop PCs.

There is currently no way for user agents such as MobileSafari to tell Web servers to appear as peer versions that run on PCs, thus there is no way to convince Web sites to provide full content versions despite the fact that the browser can actually deal with them!

I can think of a few sites that annoy the living daylights out of me in this regard:

• Nintendo Australia show a "mobile" version of its site, and does not allow iPhone users access to the full-featured version. The mobile version of the site is so cut-down that it's not worth visiting unless you want to read about press releases from the company.
• Twitter have forced their consistent user interface conventions with their "Twitter Mobile App" look, feel and function onto iPhone users, to the point where users cannot perform some rather important administrative procedures, such as edit their own profiles, from their mobile device. To edit their Twitter account profile, users now need to use a PC! Not even an iPad can help out here!
• In the same manner as Twitter, other popular communications and social networking services from Google, Yahoo! and Facebook all have reduced their services to the point where only some functions are available to users from their mobile phone.

With all these limitations being imposed on mobile users, there's much less sense in using gadgets like an iPad—you may as well get yourself a MacBook Air instead since they appear to the world as Macs, and Web site developers haven't crippled their sites for that user base yet.

(Users of Web OS and Android may have a different experience here... I shan't comment on those since I'm not familiar with them.)

If you want a Windows-based PC rather than a Mac, that's OK, but I'm just not familiar with what mobile options you'd have in this regard... except that you'll want to run a "desktop" Windows environment rather than a "mobile" one.

Web site developers need to understand mobile platforms are much more capable than what they are giving them credit for. All too often, there are times where I'd like to visit their "full" site with my phone, but am not able to because access to them have been denied at the Web server. I am not pleased at all in their decision to do this.

There is no harm in making tools that are more suitable for use on mobile phones... on an iPhone, there is a way to do this without sacrificing the utility of MobileSafari for what should be ubiquitous Web surfing. It's just that Web developers are just not making it happen sensibly.

Also, Apple could provide a switch in MobileSafari so that it can pose as a Mac or PC version of Safari for those times where Web sites are being too selective or abusive for no good reason.

—tonza