HTML 5 on Mobile Browsers

Our most recent release of Gmail for the Android and iPhone browser tries to take advantage of some of the cool new HTML-5 capabilities that these browsers are supporting. In particular, both app-cache and the database are used heavily by our application. It's pretty amazing that these mobile browsers are pushing ahead as fast (or faster) than the desktop browsers. Just a year ago, writing anything for a mobile browser was slightly more painful than banging your head against the wall. Today, it's actually pretty reasonable.

See our first post here on the code.google.com blog: http://google-code-updates.blogspot.com/2009/04/html5-and-webkit-pave-way-for-mobile.html We plan to post regularly to this blog with details on how we worked with HTML-5, including details on new features, browser quirks, etc.

In my opinion it's great that mobile browsers are starting to do their part to make the web truly available to people on the go. Now if only carriers in Canada would provide reasonably priced data plans so people could actually take advantage of this. Ugh.