MobileUX

I’ve been a mobile Safari user for over a year now, on both the 2G and 3G iPhone models. One thing that I’m continually bugged about is that it seems whenever I hit the back button, Safari goes out and gets a new version of the page. And if I have multiple pages open, typically when I move from one to the other (in effect moving from one “tab” to the next), the page usually refreshes. (OK, that’s two things.)  In my experience, Safari doesn’t do much in the way of caching pages.

The user experience when using the browser takes a hit. What I’m not sure about is if the mobile Safari is intentionally set up this way, to make a call to the network every time a page changes. Perhaps it is too much to ask of a mobile browser that is capable of rendering full, true-to-life webpages (not just smaller mobile sites.) Since mobile Safari is capable of keeping up to 8 pages open, this is a considerable amount of information that Safari needs to keep open and readily-accessible, let alone keeping additional page history and assets stored so they can be pulled up immediately. I’m sure there is a pretty good hit on the processor as well since it takes some work to simply render a page from memory, let alone load one as it rolls in over the network.

If you’ve ever used the mobile version of Opera, you know that the “back” action is very fast and visually cool – the pages “swipe” back from right to left, as though they had been sitting in a long row. Granted, Opera uses techniques for optimizing the content to generate smaller pages that work on browser. With the Blackberry browser it seems sometimes is was quick loading a previous page when selecting “back” and sometimes it made a call to the network and refreshed the previous page. I was never quite sure when it was going to do which. The Blackberry proxy servers do some optimization on the server-side, so the pages that the Blackberry browser rendered were somewhat mobilized. (note: I’m referring to the the browsers used prior to OS 4.6 – the browser in the Bold and the Kickstart might provide a different experience.)

Since OS 2.0 of OSX for mobile is bringing the iPhone platform into its toddler years, perhaps we will see an improvement in the responsiveness of Safari this over time?