Mobile Phone/PDA Web Browser Screen Size Detection

Posted 2008-07-29 in Mobile Web by Johann.

Screen size detection of mobile phones and PDAs seems to be a minefield – I had planned to spend minutes on this…

Screen Size in the User-Agent

IEMobile and Opera Mobile on Windows Mobile and the Palm Blazer browser send the screen size in the user agent string using a WIDTHxHEIGHT form. Examples include Dopod818Pro/Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 4.01; Windows CE; PPC; 240x320; Dopod818 Pro) or Xda_trion; 240x320 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows CE; IEMobile 6.12). A simple regular expression like ([0-9]{3})x([0-9]{3}) should work here.

Opera Mini

Opera Mini sends a X-OPERAMINI-PHONE-UA header with the request that contains a handset-specific user agent string whose value ends with …PPC; 240x320 on my PDA.

IEMobile

IEMobile additionally sends a UA-PIXELS: 320x240 header with its requests.

X-OS-PREFS

Featured in older Opera browsers on Symbian. Looks like X-OS-Prefs: fw:176; fh:208; ….

PROFILE, X-WAP-PROFILE, X-WAP-REMOVEDPROFILE, OPT

WAP-era headers that point to a UAProf profile of the mobile device. This URL needs to be loaded and parsed for the prf:ScreenSize element. Seems to be mostly used in Nokia mobile browsers.

UA-PIXELS, X-UP-DEVCAP-SCREENPIXELS, X-JPHONE-DISPLAY

These seem to be present in certain (unmentioned) mobile phones.

Other X-… Headers

There are even more X-… headers.

Given this complexity, does it make sense to invest in a abstraction library like WURFL? I see less of the “old” mobile browsers every day and WURFL is never complete anyway.

Mobile browser statistics: WebKit on the rise, Opera losing share

Posted 2007-12-09 in Mobile Web by Johann.

Two months ago, I presented mobile browser statistics for my websites. The clear winner at that time was NetFront. Let’s do this again.

Mobile browser list

The top 15 mobile browsers, taken from the last four weeks of log files.

1. Mozilla/4.0 (PSP (PlayStation Portable); 2.00)

4004 requests. NetFront-based.

2. Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; U; CPU like Mac OS X; en) AppleWebKit/420.1 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/3.0 Mobile/3A109a Safari/419.3

338 requests.

3. Opera/9.50 (J2ME/MIDP; Opera Mini/4.0.9800/209; U; en)

270 requests.

4. Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; U; CPU like Mac OS X; en) AppleWebKit/420.1 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/3.0 Mobile/3B48b Safari/419.3

232 requests.

5. Mozilla/5.0 (SymbianOS/9.2; U; Series60/3.1 NokiaN95/11.0.026; Profile/MIDP-2.0 Configuration/CLDC-1.1 ) AppleWebKit/413 (KHTML, like Gecko) Safari/413

231 requests.

6. Mozilla/5.0 (SymbianOS/9.2; U; Series60/3.1 NokiaE90-1/07.24.0.3; Profile/MIDP-2.0 Configuration/CLDC-1.1 ) AppleWebKit/413 (KHTML, like Gecko) Safari/413

211 requests.

7. Opera/8.01 (J2ME/MIDP; Opera Mini/2.0.6530/1724; en; U; ssr)

168 requests.

8. Opera/8.01 (J2ME/MIDP; Opera Mini/1.1.4948/hifi/tmobile/uk; SonyEricsson K510i; en; U; ssr)

167 requests

9. Opera/9.10 (Nintendo Wii; U; ; 1621; en)

134 requests

10. Mozilla/5.0 (iPod; U; CPU like Mac OS X; en) AppleWebKit/420.1 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/3.0 Mobile/3A110a Safari/419.3

124 requests.

11. Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.0) BlackBerry8800/4.2.1 Profile/MIDP-2.0 Configuration/CLDC-1.1 VendorID/125

124 requests.

12. Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Symbian OS; Nokia N80/; 9712) Opera 8.65 [en]

123 requests.

13. Mozilla/5.0 (SymbianOS/9.2; U; Series60/3.1 NokiaE90-1/07.40.1.2; Profile/MIDP-2.0 Configuration/CLDC-1.1 ) AppleWebKit/413 (KHTML, like Gecko) Safari/413

107 requests.

14. Nokia6300/2.0 (05.50) Profile/MIDP-2.0 Configuration/CLDC-1.1

96 requests.

15. HPiPAQhw6900/1.0/Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 4.01; Windows CE; PPC; 240x240)

77 requests.

Raw numbers

Two months ago, I looked at 2242 requests.

1. NetFront: 1066 requests, 48 %
2. Opera Mini: 626 requests, 28 %
3. Opera: 390 requests, 17 %
4. AvantGo: 148 requests, 15 %
5. WebKit: 12 requests, < 1 %

This time, I looked at 6282 requests.

1. NetFront: 4004 requests, 63 %, up 15 %
2. WebKit: 1243 requests, 19 %, up 18 %
3. Opera Mini: 605 requests, 9 %, down 19 %
4. Opera: 257 requests, 4 %, down 13 %
5. Nokia: 96 requests, 1 %
6. IEMobile/Pocket Internet Explorer: 77 requests, 1 %

The verdict

• Whereas I could see a slow shift from Internet Explorer to Mozilla-based browsers on johannburkard.de, the mobile web changes a lot faster and more deeply.
• Microsoft’s mobile browsers are not popular at all, as are Gecko-based browsers. The mobile web looks like an anti-web from the browser perspective.
• The mobile web usage has almost tripled in two months on my sites.

Nokia E90 Communicator with Apple Safari as mobile web browser

Posted 2007-10-30 in Mobile Web by Johann.

As it turns out, the Nokia E90 Communicator has Safari as its mobile browser. Of course the E90 doesn’t look like the iPhone at all, but at least the same browser is there.

From what I remember, Nokia had used an own browser in the past. Even though I have no actual experience with Safari, I’m sure it is a better browser than the old Nokia and the other commonly encountered mobile browsers.

User Agent

The E90’s user agent string is Mozilla/5.0 (SymbianOS/9.2; U; Series60/3.1 NokiaE90-1/07.24.0.3; Profile/MIDP-2.0 Configuration/CLDC-1.1 ) AppleWebKit/413 (KHTML, like Gecko) Safari/413.

Log entries

The requests made by the Safari browser when loading my home page.

"GET / HTTP/1.1" …
"GET /misc/style.js HTTP/1.1" …
"GET /misc/handheld.css HTTP/1.1" …
"GET /misc/screen.css HTTP/1.1" …
"GET /blog/?flavor=simple&entries=1 HTTP/1.1" …

While the Safari-based browser supports JavaScript, it loads style sheets for the handheld and screen media type which reminds me of IEMobile and NetFront.

I might do another statistic about mobile browser usage in a few months and see what has changed in the mobile CSS and JavaScript world.

Simple Mobile Phone Detection

Posted 2009-02-12 in Mobile Web by Johann.

Looking for an easy and simple way to detect mobile browsers?

This regular expression should be able to detect most popular mobile phone browsers:

(IEMobile|Windows CE|NetFront|PlayStation|PLAYSTATION|like Mac OS X|MIDP|UP\.Browser|Symbian|Nintendo|Android)

Explanation

• IEMobile selects newer Windows Mobile browsers.
• Windows CE selects older Windows Mobile browsers.
• NetFront obviously selects NetFront browsers.
• PlayStation and PLAYSTATION select the PlayStation browsers.
• like Mac OS X selects iPhone and iPod browsers.
• MIDP selects most BlackBerry and Opera Mini browsers.
• UP.Browser selects OpenWave-based browsers.
• Symbian selects Opera browsers for Symbian.
• Nintendo selects Opera browsers on Nintendo.

There are a few rare other mobile browsers not covered by this regular expression. Do you know of some that should be included? Please post a comment!

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