The Mobile Web and Web Browsers

The Web-to-Go

It wasn’t long ago that accessing the Internet required a hefty computer or laptop and a wired connection. These days, Internet-enabled smartphones and other mobile devices are everywhere. Smartphones are changing the way we browse the Internet, letting us leave our desks and pull up our favorite websites, browse Facebook, and check our email from anywhere. In fact, there’s a good chance you’re reading this from a mobile device.

 

More than half the mobile phone users in the United States today own a smartphone. As smartphone screens get larger and prices get lower—you can now get a low-end, prepaid smartphone for the about the same price as a traditional flip phone—more and more consumers are making the switch.

Lightweight and Portable

Smartphones are fast making inroads into the developing world, as they did in the developed world. One reason for the surge in popularity of smartphones is their ability to access information on-the-go. Connecting to the Net from a device that slips into your pocket instead of a hauling around a bulky laptop offers a lot of conveniences. You can check your social network, answer e-mail or simply browse the Web while sunbathing on the beach or waiting in line at the market.

The integration of GPS into most smartphones has also changed the way we interact with the world. Maps on our phone can deliver turn-by-turn driving directions. Search results can be tailored to match our location. Augmented reality allows us to view information about local stores and attractions simply by holding up our phones. Gone are the days of getting lost in a new city or struggling to find that out-of-the-way Mexican restaurant everyone’s talking about.

Slower Speed

When accessing the Web from a smartphone, browsing won’t be quite as fast as with a broadband connection, though mobile networks are quickly catching up. Modern high-speed mobile connections are more than fast enough to handle video games and streaming video, just don’t expect the same level of uninterrupted performance as you would experience using your home network. Of course, since modern smartphones and tablets can connect to the Internet using Wi-Fi, you should be able to enjoy the same speeds on any device using your home’s wireless network.

Screen Size

Smartphone screen sizes vary from a tiny 3.5 inches to the near-tablet-size 6 inches. It’s important to test out a few different sizes and decide which is best for you. While viewing and usage become substantially easier, these larger screens can also be bulky and hard to fit in your pocket.

The small size of a smartphone screen presents a problem for some people, making text and images difficult to see, so if you plan on doing extensive web browsing on your smartphone, you should consider one with a larger screen. Of course, even the largest smartphone screens are still much smaller than most people’s laptop or desktop monitors, so for prolonged viewing or work, most people will still want a traditional device or at least a large-screen tablet.

Navigation

Navigating a web page on a smaller screen requires dexterity. Website developers are well aware of this issue, and many sites are now customized especially for viewing on mobile devices. Mobile-compatible websites use an easier-to-navigate menu and a modified text and image layout that fits perfectly into the screen of your smartphone, eliminating the need to scroll horizontally.

Cost Considerations

The cost of mobile Internet access depends on your location, carrier, and cell phone plan. For example, in the United States, most carriers offer monthly data packages, similar to the packages offered for mobile minutes and texts. Subscribers can add additional data if they are approaching their monthly limit, or upgrade to a larger monthly plan as necessary. Some carriers offer unlimited data plans, though many of these include lower connections speeds after subscribers reach a monthly high-speed data limit.

Design

Not all smartphones are designed the same. If you’re planning on purchasing one, be sure to take it for a test drive to determine the smartphone’s ease of handling. Most smartphones now utilize a virtual keyboard, meaning the keyboard is digitally displayed on the touchscreen, though some smartphones still include physical keys. Physical keys are easier for some people to navigate, but can significantly increase the weight of the device.

Operating System

The operating system that powers your smartphone is another important consideration. Android and Apple’s iOS are the most popular smartphone operating systems. Android provides users with the ability to fully customize their phone experience, while iOS provides a simpler interface and integration with other Apple products.

Apps

The biggest difference between traditional web browsing and the mobile web experience is the use of apps. With your desktop or laptop, the web browser is your primary tool for accessing the Internet. On your phone, many Internet services, such as Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, online banking, and more can all be done without an Internet browser. Instead, you can download the service’s specialized app from your phone’s app store, and use the service in its own program, similar to the way you run computer programs like MS Word on your desktop computer.

While nearly all of these Internet services can still be accessed on a smartphone using your mobile web browser, their apps provide a mobile-optimized experience, typically run faster and smoother on your phone than the browser-based version, and make accessing your favorite services as easy as tapping an icon on your home screen.

Apps vary from device to device, but the most popular Internet services are available on both major mobile platforms, as well as less-common phone platforms such as Windows and Blackberry.

Traditional Phones

Most modern cell phones, whether smartphones or traditional flip phones and sliders include the ability to access the mobile web. Of course, your experience is going to be considerably different on a traditional cell phone than on a smartphone. For one thing, the screen size will be quite a bit smaller. For another, most non-smartphones won’t have the ability to access the high-speed mobile networks that modern smartphones can utilize, which means much slower browsing. Most of these phones also include much lower screen resolution, so graphics and images won’t look as smooth and crisp. Since they normally won’t include touch capabilities, you’ll need to use the keyboard for everything. That said, if you just need to check the weather or get an update on your next flight, these phones will manage it from just about anywhere.

Web Browsers

Do you know what a web browser is?

Almost everyone uses one every day. If you’re reading this page, you’re using a web browser. It’s funny, though — browsers are so easy to use that some of us hardly think about the fact we are using them at all. We just go on the web without a second thought.

A web browser is an application (or software program) that lets you view and interact with web pages. If you use Windows and click on a blue e icon, you’re using Microsoft’s browser (either the venerable Internet Explorer or the new Edge browser). If you use a Mac and click on the Compass-shaped icon, you are using Safari.

Other Browsers

You don’t have to use the app that came with your computer. Just because Microsoft and Apple want you to use their web browser, doesn’t mean you should.

Even if you are going to use the web browser that came with our computer, you may not be getting the most out of your browser. There are more features than you are probably using. Some of them you don’t need, but some of them might make your online experience much better.

What does a browser do?

To understand why you might want to try a new browser or dig a little into your current browser, it’s helpful to understand what exactly a browser does and how it works. This requires understanding how websites work.

When you view a page website, you aren’t viewing a single document, laid out by a designer like a newspaper or a magazine page. Rather, a web page is a collection of several different files:

• An HTML document that contains the content of the page and information about all the other files
• One or more stylesheets that define every aspect of the visual design: the layout of the content, the fonts, the colors, the size of images — everything.
• One or more Javascript files that define any dynamic interactivity on the page
• Individual images, videos, and other media

The browser handles asking the server for all of these individual resources and then handles assembling them into a usable, viewable page. This is why the same website might look different on different computers, or with different browsers — even though the assembly instructions are the same, the browser might interpret them differently. This might be because the programmers who built different browsers understood the standards differently, or it may be that one computer or another doesn’t have all the same resources and capabilities, or it might just be that the screen sizes are different.

Web standards

Above we mentioned different interpretations of “the rules.” This has to do with something called “web standards.”

The designers of all the different web browsers aren’t just making up their own rules about how to read and interpret the code that makes up a website — it is all based on a standard or specification. The standards tell browser designers how they should understand the code that website designers create.

However, each browser interprets the standard a little differently. Sometimes the standard isn’t completely clear. Sometimes the browser designers are trying to improve on the standard. Sometimes implementing the standard is too difficult.

Taken altogether, this adds up to the fact that the exact same website can look a little different, and act a little different, on different browsers. Most of the time this doesn’t matter, but sometimes it does.

Where it is most likely to matter is complex web apps — online applications like Gmail, Facebook, or your bank’s online bill-paying system.

Use the browsers your developers use

Because these minor differences can sometimes add up to pages and web applications not working properly, it can be helpful to use same web browsers that the developers who built these applications use. Sure, people who make software should test on a variety of browsers (and they do), but sometimes things just work better because it is what the developers had in mind.

For example, you might use Gmail and Google Apps, and you certainly use Google’s search engine. Google also makes a web browser called Google Chrome. As you might expect, Google’s other applications work better on their own browser than on any other browser.

The browsers most frequently used by developers and designers — the people who build websites — are:

• Google Chrome
• Mozilla Firefox

We’ll talk more about each of these later in this article.

It might be unfortunate, but very few professional developers or designers use Internet Explorer (or Edge) on a regular basis. Bugs are likely to creep in and then go unnoticed because the people building websites never see how things work in that browser.

A bit about each major browser

Microsoft Edge

Microsoft’s Edge browser is the successor to the Internet Explorer browser that has been on every Windows installation for the last two decades. It is now the default web browser on Windows 10. Edge is supposed to be light-weight and standards compliant with modern websites.

Because it is so new, it is uncertain whether Edge will become a major player in the browser world. Early reports seem to indicate that most users abandon it for other browsers (mostly Chrome and Firefox).

Microsoft Internet Explorer

If you have a PC running Windows, and you don’t have the latest version of Windows, you probably have Internet Explorer. If you click on a blue lower-case “e” with a little halo on it to get to the internet, you have Internet Explorer.

IE has been through several versions, and several versions are still widely in use. The oldest version still in use on a meaningful number of computers is IE6, which is widely recognized as not a good browser. IE7 was much better, and each version since then has been a little better than the one before.

Still, even with the latest version of IE, the standards were not well-implemented, leading to poor performance and bugs in some complicated web apps.

Developers and designers tend to dislike IE, so they tend not to use it. This can have an impact on overall compatibility.

Safari

Safari is the default web browser built-in to Mac OSX. It is a decent, standards-based browser. It’s two biggest advantageous stems from the fact that it is designed and distributed by Apple:

• Upgrades and Patches automatically through the App Store system
• Apple’s approach to UI

Mozilla Firefox

Firefox is Free and Open Source. It does not include any spyware or any other data-gathering mechanism, which the other browsers often do.

Firefox has a number of developer tools — utilities and add-ons that help computer programmers do their job. Because of this, and because it is Open Source, is very popular among developers. If you are using a web application, the chances are that the person who actually made that application was using Firefox while they built it.

Firefox has a feature which (at the time of writing) none of the other browsers have, and which is great if you read a lot of longer articles online — news, essays, blog posts. It’s called the “Reader View.” Click the book icon in the address bar and the main content of the page will be displayed in a format optimized for reading — with all the ads removed. You can even pick your own font and text size. This is great if you often find yourself zooming in on a page to read it better.

Chrome

Chrome is a relatively new browser (first released in 2008, as opposed to 2002 for Firefox). It looks and feels like a slick, cleaned-up version of Firefox, and in fact, provides many of the same types of benefits. Unlike Firefox, which was adopted primarily by developers and power users, Chrome became popular with average users.

Chrome has special features that allow it to work particularly well if you have a Google Apps or Gmail account. Among other things, it uses your Google login to sync your browser settings, preferences, bookmarks, and history across any computer you use.

While this is a benefit for some users, it does require that a great deal of personally-identifiable information is being stored by Google. If you also use Google’s search engine, Google Apps, and YouTube (also owned by Google), this might make you uncomfortable.

Browsers and Operating Systems

One of the reasons that Firefox and Chrome are both very popular is that they are the only two “mainstream” browsers which are available on all major platforms — Windows, Mac, and Linux. Internet Explorer and Edge are only available for Microsoft Windows, and Safari is only available for Mac.

This provides another good reason to use one of those two browsers — it makes it easier to switch back and forth between platforms.

Convergence of best features

Ten years ago, or even five years ago, different browsers were very different from each other. The user experience of each was different, the rendering of each was different — everything was different.

One major trend in web browser design is convergence. This means that all the different browsers become a little more similar to each new release. The companies that develop them copy each other, new technology enables advancement to all of them at the same time, and design trends sweep across the industry.

There are still differences — mostly minor, as mentioned above — and those differences can cause differences in website performance. It’s still a good idea to try a new or better browser, but things are a lot more stable today than ever before.

Basic Browser Use

There’s not that much to using a browser — they are designed to be very easy to use. You probably even already know how, even if you aren’t sure what everything is called.

• The main control panel for a browser, at the top of the window, is the Navigation Menu (or Navigation Bar). Within this panel is:
  • The Address bar — This is the text-box that displays the address (URL) of the current page. Most browsers have an auto-complete feature built-in — as soon as you start typing an address or website name, it will start offering choices based on previously visited sites.
  • The Back and Forward buttons. The Back button takes you to the previous page. The Forward button, which only works if you have used the Back button, brings you (back) to the page you were on before hitting Back. Note about Back buttons: Don’t use the Back button in web apps or after submitting forms. It can sometimes cause problems, like forms being re-sent.
  • The Refresh button, which usually looks like a circular arrow. This button re-loads the current page by resending the original request. This is useful if the information on a page has gone out of date, or if there was a problem loading the page. Doing this after submitting a form can cause the form to be submitted twice, so don’t do that.
  • Most browsers (including Chrome and Firefox) have a Star Icon that allows you to Bookmark a page. Bookmarking just means saving a local link to that page, so you can find it again later without having to remember it.
• To the right of the navigation panel is a menu icon. In Firefox and Chrome, it looks like three horizontal lines. In Internet Explorer, it is shaped like a gear. In Edge, it looks like three dots next to each other. This provides most of the other main utility items you might need:
  • Save
  • Print
  • Zoom in and out
  • Preference
  • Settings
• The bulk of the browser window is the main Viewing Panel, which is where you see the actual contents of the website.
  • Whenever you hover over a link with your mouse, there is a little text pane that pops up at the very bottom-left corner of the Viewing Panel. This shows the URL (address) of the link. If you click on the link, you will be taken to that page.

Browser Protips

Private Browsing

Most browsers have a “Private Browser” mode (in Chrome it is called “Incognito”).

When you browse normally, your browser activity is saved on your computer. This lets you find old pages easily and also helps pages load faster — elements of the page are stored locally so they don’t have to be fetched every time.

Sometimes, though, you don’t want to leave browser history. If you share a computer with someone else, you might not always want them to know what you have been searching for, reading about, or viewing. The private mode will also prevent the browser from storing account login information.

When you use a Private Browsing session, everything from your session is deleted when you close the window. No history or saved information is kept — it’s as if you were never there.

This can also be good if you need to login to the same webpage or app under two different usernames. Use Private (or Incognito) browsing for the second login, and you won’t confuse the application.

Important note about private browsing: This mode only affects the browser itself. It does not protect your anonymity regarding the server itself, and it doesn’t fool network routers and servers. If you are at work or school, or somewhere else where you browsing is monitored by the network, using Private Browsing will not help you.

Start Page

All the browsers now have some form of Start Page. This page shows you the most common pages you visit, under the assumption that you might want to get to them quickly — and that works because you probably do.

Sometimes, though, the browser gets it wrong. For example, if you move back and forth between two pages on the same site a lot, the browser might provide both of them in your Start page, even though you really only want and need one of them.

In all cases, you can customize what appears on your Start Page. Usually, there is a link to do this on the Start Page itself.

Apps and Add-ons

Another reason that Firefox and Chrome are popular is that they both have plugin mechanism — you can install add-ons to the browser that provides additional functionality.

Chrome has full-blown Apps — software programs with stand-alone functionality that run inside the browser, like Apps on your phone. The range from simple games to complex office software and everything in between. Many of them are connected to the internet and take advantage of the connection to a web browser.

Add-ons, which exist for both Chrome and Firefox, add functionality within the main use of a browser. (They are actually only called Add-ons in Firefox. Chrome calls them Extensions.) For example, there are several popular Screen Shot add-ons that allow you to take a picture of whatever is currently on the View Panel.