Opinion

In 2012 Samsung Internet was made available as a stand-alone app and since then it has begun to acquire momentum, particularly in Africa and the Middle East. It has become so well recognised in these regions that its usage topped Mobile Safari. The latest stable release adds features such as Iris Scanning, Samsung Pay Support and Content Blocking. We take a look at the Samsung browser popularity around the globe and how it compares to other android browsers.

Slow page loading or latency is a common challenge for websites when viewed on mobile devices. Ads may also not appear affecting viewability, revenue income from advertisers and publisher brand safety. This blog gives you some useful tips to establish what is causing the problem.

On the 24th February Google launched AMP. Announced last October, AMP is an open source platform that aims to improve user experience of the mobile Web by reducing the possible complexity of Web pages.

Friday 4th March 2016 saw 180 web professionals all with an interest in progressive enhancement assemble in London for a one day conference organised by Simon McManus.

"The Web is the most hostile software engineering environment imaginable." - Douglas Crockford

I continue to be amazed at how the humble User-Agent is misunderstood. My purpose in writing this blog post is to reset some myths passed down from web professional to web professional over the years concerning User-Agents. This was typified in the debate and conversation I witnessed at Enhance Conference.

A topic close to the heart of many of our readers, the much loved Canadian handset company has experienced some turbulent times in the past few years. There's no denying that they have made some excellent phones, but they are in the middle of a turnaround at the moment (event T-Mobile US' John Legere recently said “they're on the up”) in a bid to regain market share, as well as focus on areas such as security software and device management.

Device vendors as varied as the mighty Samsung, to brands like Pantech and Micromax all recognise the importance of identifying different device models when accessing web sites. However, Apple do not fully support this approach.

Some device detection solutions have tried to address the problem by artificially stressing the iPhone or iPad to determine how quickly its processor can complete iterative tasks. Understanding how the device performs under stress provides an indication as to the CPU available and therefore the model of the device. The approach can yield more information but ironically at the expense of user experience as the page load time increases and the battery is drained more rapidly.

If every web site were to stress iPhones and iPads to gain model information the web would slow down for Apple users. This isn’t in Apple’s interest. However, if Apple make a simple change the problem can be avoided.

Every day consumer electronic vendors fuel the growing demand for smartphones, tablets and smartwatches by releasing new web enabled devices. From the mighty Apple iPhone and iPad to the relative smaller-scale like Gionee, Oppo and Fly, 51Degrees research their devices and enter the device specifications and other information into our database.

For many marketers it's essential to know how each device and platform is performing. 51Degrees provide a tool which aggregates usage information from over 3 billion unique web visits per month and shows vendors exactly how their models are performing by country and month. This information differs to sales figures and show real usage of the web.

Published by Digital Marketing Magazine our founder James Rosewell references long established high street retailing to provide a reminder of 5 non technical factors which form the foundations of a high performance website.

It seems that the major phone makers have decided now is the time for us to all buy smart watches but what do they actually do for the consumer. They are supposed to make our lives easier by placing all the information that we were getting from our pocket and phones on to our wrist. But will this effect the way we browse the Internet?

51Degrees and The Away Foundations' digital globe gained a lot of interest at Mobile World Congress 2015. The Institution of Engineering and Technology (IET) interviewed James to understand more about the background to the project, technology involved and future plans.