Wednesday, June 14, 2006

Better Mobile Web Browsing

The popularity of surfing the Internet on the go has designers building applications with simple, easy-to-use navigation.

By Kate Greene

This screenshot demonstrates a Nokia S60 browser feature that allows users to see where they are on a Web page while simulaneously zooming in on a portion of that page. (Credit: Nokia)

The first time you log on to the Internet on a mobile device can feel liberating -- until you start browsing. Familiar Web pages look foreign in mobile form: graphics are often replaced with text, online maps for driving directions can be difficult to navigate, and zooming in on too-small text gets tiresome. With mobile Web surfing growing more and more popular -– by 2008, 1.3 billion people are expected to be connected to the Internet via cell phones, according to research firm GSM Association -- companies that design mobile browsers are using some clever tricks to make the small screen seem bigger -- and easier to use.

Nokia and Opera Software, two major players, are working on making the experience of mobile browsing as similar to desktop browsing as possible. And they offer developer kits, so independent software engineers can contribute to building more user-friendly browsers.

Nokia, which just opened up its browser source code last month, offers a high-end browser, the S60 browser. Transplanting a desktop-designed webpage onto a mobile device poses the obvious challenge of scaling down the page for a tiny screen and still making it easy to navigate. Nokia's first step was squeezing the text column to fit onto a mobile screen, so a user doesn't have to scroll left or right while reading the screen. This feature is especially useful for news websites such as the New York Times online, because each column is adjusted dynamically so it will fit onto a mobile screen, says Deepika Chauhan, technology marketing manager at Nokia.

Another S60 browser tool gives readers the option, by pressing a button, to zoom out and see an overview of an entire page. First, a user looks at the page as they would on a desktop screen, albeit scaled down; then they select an area to view more closely. After zooming in and scrolling to a different portion of the page, they see a small box in the corner of the mobile screen that shows the entire page layout, with a highlighted area tracking their position as they scroll around, says Chauhan.

A competitor, Norway-based web-browsing company Opera Software, uses a mobile browser technology, called Small Screen Rendering, that also reformats pages so text and images fit into a single phone screen, eliminating the need to scroll left and right. And Opera, too, allows a user to toggle between a zoomed-in and zoomed-out version of the screen.