My Notes from John Resig's "jQuery Hack Day" Talk

July 5th, 2010

Testing Mobile JS

John has been researching mobile space lately.

• Started in 2009 with TestSwarm

Cross-browser mobile dev is crazy

• not as bad as it used to be

• 2 to 3 years == golden age of web dev on mobile

A simple goal

• Make jQuery work on the most popular mobile platorms and browsers

• Really hard to even define scope of this problem

Three questions:

1. What platforms and browsers are popular?

2. What browsers are capable of runnning the "modern web"?

3. ?

Who has the best stats?

• Gartner: Well respected, knows sales info well

• StatCounter: Billions of hits per month

• Admob: Decent for specific platforms (Andriod, iPhone)

• Even with all this, very little info is available

Lack of Info

• Hard to find data, so developers develop for what is in front of them:

  • iPhone

  • Android

  • iPad

  • BlackBerry

• This is bad, ignoring the actual market representation

Symbian more popular among consumers than all others, despite lack of developers.

Hardest Question

• What version of those platforms are actually popular?

• No one knows (or at least Gartner won't tell)

Opera Mini most popular mobile browser (by use)

What version of each browser is popular?

• Considered to be competitive advantage to keep it private

• Apparently Yahoo! knows

  • John wants to shame Yahoo! in to sharing

Testing Strategy

• Draw a line in the sand and decide what to support, and what is too old.

• Buy devices, download simulators

• Automate testing (TestSwarm!)

Drawing a line

• Use Yahoo!'s graded browser support technique

• Qualify which browsers you will support (actibely test against) and give them a grade

• A = Full support, C = Fallback to old site, Other = Assume full support

Testing Browsers

• Two options:

  1. Buy devices

  2. Download simulators

• Simulators good for most automated testing

• Any sort of interaction testing will want to also be done on the actual device!!!

  • Always do a sanity check on physical device (Touch devices big example)

Simulators

• Available for most mobile platforms and browsers

  • But the simulators are largely windows only

Automate Testing

• Once you have simulators or devices, interact with them as little as possible

• Automated test execution important

• TestSwarm developed for exactly this purpose

Platforms

• Moves so fast! Even a couple months is a big difference!

• Symbian S60

  • Nokia

  • Webkit in v5.0 and up

  • simulators available from nokia.com

  • Nokia just announced they are killing Symbian in favor of Meego!

• iPhone OS

  • Almost all users are on the latest OS version

  • Safari 4

  • 1 gotcha: no fixed position support (difficult to implement toolbars)

  • Reccomended TouchScroll library

  • Simulator is part of the iPhone SDK

  • iPad and iPhone views to toggle

  • No 2.X emulator!

• BlackBerry OS

  • Enormously popular, still growing!

  • Switching to WebKit soon (thank goodness)

  • Anything older than 4.6 is really frightening, 5.0 is decent

  • Simulator downloads on their dev site

  • Doesn't support internet, need "internet simulator" :-/

• Android

  • Gaining marketshare at incredible rate

  • Predicts overtaking iPhone in the next year or so

  • Mobile manufacturers jumping on it because it is free.

  • Huge ammount of fracturing on version

  • Opposite of iPhone

  • people aren't upgrading (a lot of blame on the mobile provider, not google)

  • Going to be around for at least ~2 more years

  • Simulator easy download

• Windows Mobile

  • 6.5 uses IE6 as rendering engine

  • Next release is using IE7 (!)

  • At least we all know the quirks by now (yay...)

  • 6.1 ships with IE4, no way its getting supported

  • 6.5 simulator easy download

• WebOS

  • Not clear where its future is going

  • Webkit, so it is easy to support

  • 1.4 simulator ships with 1.3 browser — WTF?

  • Only way to test 1.4 browser w/ physical devices

• Maego (being renamed as Meebo)

  • Nokia 900 only device (not even phone)

  • Nokia is moving to this

  • Gecko based browser in Maego, not sure where Meebo is headed

  • "Very important, very soon"

• Opera

  • Not platform, but browser is everywhere

  • Two browsers:

  • Opera Mobile:

    • Desktop experience

  • Opera Mini:

    • "Glorified bitmap viewer"

    • No JS on client

    • Let JS run 2 seconds on server

    • Interaction is on the server

    • Runs pretty much everywhere

    • jQuery UI going to at least "look right"

    • Simulator is cross platform

• Fennec

  • Maemo and Android

  • Equiv to latest Firefox

  • Faster than the built in browser!

• Netfront

  • Used on Playstation and N-Gage

  • Not worth the time of day

Phonegap!

• Not platform, more environment

• jQuery will work with phonegap

• Use webkit to make webapps for app stores

Summary

• Roughly, this is equivalent to what you are supporting:

  • Opera 9.5, 10

  • IE 6, 7

  • FF 3.5+

  • Safari 2, 3, 4

  • And BlackBerry

• Don't assume since something is Webkit (for example) other WK browsers will work!

  • Test!

  • Simulate!

What devices to buy?

• "A level" will cost ~$2,500:

  • iPhone 3GS

  • Or iPod Touch

  • iPad

  • Nokia

  ...

• "B level" will cost ~$2,000

Questions

• Why do carriers restrict upgrades?

  • They like knowing exactly whats running?

  • Known evil

• Amazon employee asked about BB:

  • BB has JS disabled by default

  • Scary message when you try to use JS

• Do the android carrier specific changes affect the browser?

  • Not really, mostly the UI and "skin", not functionality

  • So far, who knows in the future

  • Much worse for native apps than web apps! Many little differences between Android versions there

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