Filtered by: Scitech
SciTech

Microsoft promises update to make IE browser more mobile-friendly


Windows Phone users can soon expect some decent surfing on mobile sites from Internet Explorer 11, Microsoft's default mobile browser.
 
In a blog post, Microsoft is promising the enhancements to IE 11 in an upcoming update for the Windows Phone 8.1 operating system.

"Based on your feedback, we pursued a web experience for IE users consistent with what is available on iOS and Android devices – even where this meant we would be adding non-standard web platform features. We believe that this is a more pragmatic approach to running today's less-standardized mobile web," IE program managers Adrian Bateman and Frank Olivier said.
 
They said a test of more than 500 top mobile web sites showed the IE11 update improved the experience on more than 40 percent of them.
 
Both virtually admitted many modern mobile web pages were "designed and built for iOS and the iPhone," thus giving users of other devices "a degraded experience."
 
In response, Microsoft has improved the code in IE 11 to have websites detect IE 11 for Windows Phone as a mobile browser, so the site would not provide content for desktop versions.
 
Working with Mozilla
 
Meanwhile, Microsoft asked the public to help by reporting sites using non-standard code.
 
Bateman and Olivier said Microsoft is collaborating with Mozilla at webcompat.com to record broken sites.
 
"These sites often cause issues across multiple browsers including Firefox and IE and it is easy for you to report problematic sites," they said.
 
Also, they asked web developers to run their sites through the scanner tool on http://modern.ie, to identify common coding problems including issues with vendor prefixes and help fix one's code.
 
"When taken all together, the changes we have made to IE in Windows Phone 8.1 Update dramatically improve compatibility with the most popular mobile web sites. The update should start rolling out to those of you already on the Windows Phone 8.1 Preview for Developers next week and will roll out to consumers with devices running Windows Phone 8.1 in the coming months," they said.  — Joel Locsin/ELR, GMA News