Mobile Variance

When dealing with mobile development, one of the great challenges is getting a website to be readable when rendered. With desktop web development, we check major browsers, such as Chrome, Firefox, Safari, Opera, and Internet Explorer, and possibly different operating systems (OS), such as WinXP, Windows 7, Linux, and Mac OS X. Catering for the different possible combinations of browsers, browser versions, and OSes can be quite a chore.

With mobile devices, the rendering capabilities are much less standard. This makes mobile rendering much more complex. For instance, almost all modern desktop computers support thousands of colors and a screen resolution of at least 800 by 600 pixels. However, cellphones, smartphones, tablets, e-readers, and other mobile devices might only support grayscale or a limited color palette. Physical sizes also vary considerably. These are only three capabilities. There are hundreds of different capabilities that devices could differ in. We will go over some of these capabilities later in the chapter.