I am making a website for windows mobile phones 6.1 and trying to figure out which browser to use. I have ran into a pattern that some functions that run on 1 browser don't work on another. So far I have tried
IE 6 - relatively better but bad alignment and page is zoomed in when opens
Opera Mobile 10 - Javascript keypress does not work, Although good alignment and screen resolution settings
Mozilla Fennec - Best one so far but is really really slow.
Any ideas if I update IE/OS on these phones to solve this, I am trying to avoid buying new licenses?
Developing web sites for Desktop or Mobile is always a challenge with all the different browsers.
If you intend to use a batch of one mobile device model, you can define which browser has to be used. If you are not in that position, you have to work against different browsers.
On windows mobile 6.1 the only standard you can rely on is the built-in IE6 mobile browser.
If you can define a 3rd party browser, you may have a look at ZetaKey (based on WebKit).
Related
I am looking at trying to scan barcodes from a mobile device.
I been doing some research and I having hard time finding JavaScript libraries that can do this.
I see these projects
zxing
This seems to be no longer in development and just bugs fixes are done?
QuaggaJS
This one, I am not sure if it is development either anymore as changelog is from 2017
quagga2
This seems to be a fork of the one above? So this might be the better choice to go with vs the 2?
What I am trying to achieve is this. I want to go on an andriod device (think phone, maybe tablet), load up chrome or firefox, go to my site click a button and load up the devices camera and scan a bar code (mostly EAN-8/13).
I want to do the same thing on apple devices (iphone and ipad), load up safari (not sure if they got chrome and Firefox on these devices. I don't own apple), click a button and load up their devices cameras and scan a bar code.
I think this is possible in all the libraries I listed above, but I am still unclear if this is possible on apple devices? I read somewhere that before ios 14 it would not be possible?
I am open to other libaries, I can use Jquery, vanilla javascript and I think angular (but I think it is version 3).
Just been doing this same research myself. All of those open source ones you listed seem to be either dead or have performance/reliability issues. Looks like only the commercial versions are really viable at the moment:
Dynamsoft - https://www.dynamsoft.com/store/dynamsoft-barcode-reader/
Scanbot - https://scanbot.io/products/barcode-software/web-barcode-scanner/
There are also two different mobile apps that are viable. These are web apps that just display a browser view and make a barcode scanning function from the app itself available on the page:
https://berrywing.com/scan-to-web-app/
https://www.mochasoft.dk/iphone_barcode2.htm
The second one has a more capable JS API of the two.
UPDATE: I went with that last option from Mochasoft. Turned out quite well.
Can you create multiple windows on the new mobile Chrome packaged apps? I ask this because
chrome.app.window.create("host/index.html",
{
id: "host",
bounds: {
width: 1000,
height: 500
}
});
is working fine on desktop () but not so great on the iOS simulator ().
Short answer: Chrome Apps for Mobile do not support multiple windows at the moment.
The root of the problem is that mobile devices don't have traditional window managers, per-se.
We thought about trying to simulate it with some sort of edge swipe gesture, but it raised a bunch of questions: Should we hijack gestures your application may already be using? Should we have title bars that decrease the size of your application surface? What if our solution does not fit with the look&feel of your application? All hard questions to answer, so we opted not to support multiple windows for now.
On Android L-release, theres a cool new feature that was just announced that will allow applications to have multiple views ("windows") appear in the Recents switcher, so perhaps we can experiment with that.. But I think it would still be more confusing for users to switch between Recents than between windows on desktop chrome, so not sure if will be the right option for most applications.
If you want to have multiple views within your application, its best to use a web framework that helps for navigating between them within a single window. This has actually generally been the accepted best-practice for hybrid web apps for a long time.
I have a need to differentiate between the native (Android) browser and Google Chrome on more recent Android devices, but keep running into problems, specifically with more recent Samsung devices (the Galaxy S4, Galaxy S4 mini and Galaxy Mega).
We have some device detection in-house which analyses the user agent sent from the browser to try and determine which browser is being used. Traditionally to detect Chrome, the code would look for either "Chrome" or "CriOS" within the user agent, normally these are present in the last part of the user agent string (according to the Wikipedia article on User agents, this is used to indicate available enhancements).
Up until very recently, this worked without issue*.
On the latest Samsung Galaxy devices (listed above) running Android 4.2.2, the native browser returns "Chrome" in the user agent string. From some brief reading around the subject, this is because the native browser uses Chromium (I'll admit, I didn't understand the differences between Chromium and Chrome until I read around the subject a bit, more info here).
This also invalidates the use of Chrome feature detection suggested here.
The main issue with this is that we're seeing minor rendering differences between the two browsers, which we'd normally handle with browser specific CSS hacks**, which we're now unable to use.
So far, we've only seen this issue on Samsung Galaxy devices, when tested on a Nexus 4 running Android 4.2.2, the native browser does not return Chrome as part of the user agent. It could be that this is a problem very specific to Samsung Galaxy devices running Android 4.2.2, but at this juncture, we don't have a broad enough range of devices to test on.
Does anyone know of any way of reliably differentiating between the two browsers without using either of the two methods above?
*that's without any issues that we've noticed or that have been reported to us.
**yes, I know using hacks isn't the best way of doing things, but when it's that or re-write large chunks of the code, hacks tend to win out.
I recently took a look at Mobilizer http://www.springbox.com/mobilizer/
It's pretty amazing, being able to simulate the interfaces of iphones and stuff.
However, my question is that is it actually capable of rendering the exact same behavior not just for layout but for the javascript scripts?
I mean it will pretty hurt to find out that the script ran correctly in the emulator only to fail in the real scenario...
This program will not emulate the actual phone OS. As far as I can tell, it is just loading up the page in an internal (desktop based) browser and displaying it within the phone with the correct dimensions etc. It is probably sending the User Agent string that belongs to that device as well.
So, It is useful for testing your layout on different screen sizes, testing your mobile redirect scripts and saving out mockups of the website on a device for clients.
It is definitely not to be used to test if your website will work on that device.
To accurately test without a physical device on:
iOS, check out the iOS simulator that comes with X Code.
Android, check out the Android emulator that comes with the Android SDK.
WebOS, check out the WebOS emulator from the webOS SDK
Blackberry, check out the Blackberry Simulators (Windows only)
Unfortunately, there is no app that makes testing on all these devices easy as it seemed 'Mobilizer' did. If you can, it's always good to test on the actual devices too as emulators aren't always perfect.
What is the best client side library (framework) for creating web-based applications (not phone specific appsfor modern smartphones (WEbkit compatible).
I 'm mostly thinking of a modern, light JavaScript framework that is specially designed to work with modern Web-kit enabled smart phones.
I heard http://jquerymobile.com was pretty good any suggestions or comments..
JQuery's is the only big new thing I'm aware of. Also keep in mind, jq-mobile is more of a widget library. You still have to use the JQ core as a dependency. The rash of new smartphones and platforms to deal with has pretty much turned things into the wild west for web UI devs.
Fortunately most modern Android and iPhone browsers are pretty close to their desktop equivalents. I even found as-you-go testing in Windows Phone 7 with IE 8 in IE 7 mode to be a pretty good indicator of what things would look like in a Win Phone emulator but I don't think we should encourage Microsoft by supporting their outdated-at-release mobile garbage browsers before they capture market share, which will hopefully light a fire under their butts to get it right on their next mobile browser.
Since the general practice at the moment seems to be to keep things very simple and we don't really have to branch for IE for a change, the two biggest reasons to use a framework in the first place have been removed, although JQ-core is light enough for modern smart phones, IMO, and it can save some development time if you have a fair amount of behavior to build