In answer to a question from a developer from Bombay with a dot-mobi address that I couldn’t hear, Charles McCathieNevile of Opera provided an appalling response. The question was [paraphrased], “My team has spent a lot of time customizing for handsets. Now Opera Mini is hiding all the user agents from its users’ sessions. Where do you get off doing so?” As an aside to normal people, user agents are how web sites, mobile or otherwise, know what browser you are using and what kind of PC or phone hardware it is running on.
Mr. McCathieNevile’s answer [again paraphrased] was, “We’re tired of developers not allowing users to access applications based on their handset. Users would prefer a 95% solution, and our browser almost always provides one.” Though amicably phrased, this answer really means, “We think users and developers are too dumb to handle data transparency.” We blogging loons know how well that works.
And then, Mr. McCathieNevile descended into hypocrisy. In his next answer to a question from the audience, he had the gall to complain that the mobile carriers “break the content as it goes through their pipes.” If I can find him in the crowd [Update: I didn't], I’ll ask how that carrier action is any different than stripping user agent strings as they pass through the Opera Mini proxy servers.
Everyone owes Mike a big thank you for giving today’s conference a shot, but I don’t believe it qualifies as forward movement. I’m being unfair as I was there a small part of the day, but it was the same old crowd with new, better-designed slides. As an industry, we are clearly still not ready to grab the opportunity and use whatever tactics necessary to grab it.
MobileNext, whatever version number becomes associated with it, isn’t about standards or whether or not Javascript drains mobile phone batteries too quickly. It’s about getting normal people using mobile web sites, in whatever down-and-dirty way it can be caused to happen. If we have any hope of that happening in the next 24 months, it’s because the mobile web bootstraps itself off the broadband web to overcome the inefficiencies posed by the carriers and the handset vendors. Ariel at TextMarks has it exactly right — a simple broadband web site that makes the mobile phone a lot more useful.
[...] I want to disagree with what Scott said about Mobile 2.0: “but it was the same old crowd with new, better-designed slides. As an industry, we are clearly still not ready to grab the opportunity and use whatever tactics necessary to grab it.” I don’t think the slides were really all that much better in terms of design, they were about what I had seen before. Overall I don’t think we achieved what I had set out to do, which was to draw the existing online world closer to the mobile world - carrying the principles of user focused design, transparency, and open platforms from one environment into the other. The event of course was not a failure, we made a lot of introductions and connections and hopefully have set the stage for the kind of evolution I think needs to happen. But we definitely aren’t where I was hoping to be. [...]
Hi,
I guess I was unclear in my response - so I am sorry you didn’t find me during the day.
The short answer is that we don’t currently have an ID for the handset in mini - the browser is Opera. So we are not hiding data, we have never implemented such a function. I have taken up this request (which was repeated by a few developers that day) with our team, and I hope that we will in fact be able to help developers.
The explanation of the fact that we have traditionally identified as something else was an historical fact. Traditionally, developers *were* too dumb to handle data transparency (examples from this year include some big new Web 2.0 applications from large companies who should have known better), and the only reasonable response for Opera was to identify by default as another browser. The fact that we now identify by default as Opera is a measure of how far developers have come, and I believe that mobile developers have always been ahead on this curve.
Sorry I was not clearer in the session.
cheers
Chaals
[...] PPPS: Scott Rafer also seems to have found this event to be under par - check out his comments on it here. Btw. the comment from the audience about the “hiding” of the user agent in Opera Mini caused quite a discussion at our table between Mike from Opera, me and Rick and Yong from Access (Netfront Browser). [...]