Well, the portability between kernels is nice on Unixlike and Unix systems, but you would agree with me that nearly all of the developers and users for these larger desktop environments and GUIs are on Linux specifically. Technically, you can run them on Darwin even..
I would say Mozilla/Gecko was a very good choice when the project started. Webkit itself was just being open-sourced at the time and cross platform compatibility was lacking.
Hmm.. it must be even harder to develop for such a fragmented platform as the personal computer, then, where there is essentially nothing guaranteed except the OS you are writing for.
It is really hard. John Carmack has been talking for years about how much easier it is to get good performance out of a console, where the hardware is a known quantity, than on Windows, where you have to make really difficult tradeoffs based on the dozens of differences between hardware configurations.
iPhone is easier like consoles. Android is harder like PCs.
I'm not a hardware guy, but it's been my understanding that this is why drivers exist. Drivers are a nightmare, though. I don't miss dealing with them.
Drivers may provide you semantic uniformity over a diverse set of hardware, but I think Sweeny sounds more interested in performance guarantees, which they may not be able to provide, depending both on the hardware and how well the driver has been optimized.
From a perspective of the general types of apps sold on mobile phones to similar mostly one-function apps and games, I think the comparison to Windows vs. Mac holds through. On Windows, most of the smaller utilities and games are generally free and it is hard to sell them to the average consumer, whereas on Mac it is much more common to find small-scale projects that are commercial. This divide is only going to be more accelerated with new easier ways of payment for applications such as the app store.
Did no once else even consider that there would be a problem with this? I figured it was just access of my data that I upload to a server and that only I can access. I already do the same with MediaTomb, but I didn´t know it would make a world of difference to move to a third party instead of my own private server.
The gap is way shrinking. The mobile web originally meant browsers that barely supported HTML (does WAP ring a bell?), picture support was sketchy, and bandwidth was a major concern as connections were very slow. Now the majority of mobile use that use it more than once in a blue moon have the same rendering engines as most desktops on connections that rival (in my case surpass) what we have available through telcom ISPs. Screen sizes are really the only difference oftentimes. Indeed, even the plug-in landscape is similar as many smartphones over Flash plug-ins and so forth.
It's not about whether the technologies are supported. It's about the difference between what you get when you're identified as browsing on a mobile device versus anything else.
I would have been interested to see the Unix and Mac versions of IE 5 included. And wasn't IE 5.5 a significant upgrade to 5.0, which was not included?
Has anyone tried browsing with IE6 lately? At the time, everything was probably compatible with it.. but my school still uses IE6 and I am finding more and more common web pages are broken by it. At this point, it probably serves more as a content filter than anything.
