Nokia and Safari

Using Apple’s excellent web browser Safari on Windows may not be too far off considering this: Nokia develops a new browser for Series 60 by using open source software. If Nokia can make Safari run on their phones someone should be able to make it work on Windows, right?

This is excellent news to anyone looking to use their mobile phone to connect to the Internet and browse the web. The more cell phone browser options, the better. Now if I only had a Nokia Series 60 phone…

Posted on June 13, 2005 in Browsers, Quicklinks

Comments

  1. June 13, 2005 by paul haine

    Interesting. I’ve been using Opera’s mobile browser on my Nokia phone lately and have been quite impressed by it, so I’d like to see what a Safari-based browser could do on the same platform.

  2. June 13, 2005 by Small Paul

    Plus, y’know… iTunes phone! iTunes phone! :)

    Yup, now the WebCore’s been open-sourced, I guess Safari could well crop up in all sorts of places.

    Interesting times. They might have to write a lot more code to stop it choking on nasty web pages. I hear more crash complaints about Safari than any other browser. Which is fair enough, considering it’s barely 2 years old, but still.

  3. June 13, 2005 by Matt Robin

    iPod phone! iPod phone! iPod phone!

    You know it can’t be far away now that even Safari is being opened-up to the mobile phone marketplace. I thought that when I first found out that Opera was being used…and now we see Safari is getting a call-up too…hmmm!

  4. June 13, 2005 by Robert Nyman

    Well, I guess it’s good for people to have a choice.

    But personally, as a web developer, I think there are enough web browsers for the PC. Catering to all sub-par versions of IE, the different Mozilla versions and Opera is sufficient for me.

  5. June 13, 2005 by Roger Johansson (Author comment)

    Small Paul: Safari crashing? That’s very rare. It’s happened to me a couple of times, but I can live with a browser that crashes once every several months. Or maybe it’s just me staying away from those nasty sites ;-)

    Robert: I don’t think you’d need to worry much. Use the standards, make sure it works in Firefox, and Safari support is already there.

  6. June 13, 2005 by Robert Nyman

    Well, sure… :-) But we all know it isn’t always that simple.

    In the end, though, using standards when developing is the key to get as close as possible.

  7. June 13, 2005 by Roger Johansson (Author comment)

    It obviously depends on how it would be implemented, but if you look at OmniWeb, which uses WebCore and JavaScriptCore, problems are very rare. It just works. But of course, you never know ;-)

  8. June 14, 2005 by paul haine

    “Use the standards, make sure it works in Firefox, and Safari support is already there.”

    I’m not convinced. I’ve made several sites that have worked in Firefox but had various display bugs in Safari.

  9. June 14, 2005 by Roger Johansson (Author comment)

    paul: I didn’t mean for you to take it literally ;-) Yes, there can be some minor differences depending on the CSS you use. But those are usually just that: minor. At least that is my experience.

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