Some companies (Goole being a good example) go out of their way to provide mobile-optimised versions of their websites. Others… not so much.
Using a badly designed site on a phone browser can be incredibly frustrating – for example, installing that Flipsilent app took ages because the hosting site helpfully put the download links right at the bottom of a huge page filled with adverts.
IBM might have a solution. They are working on a project that will let you take a favourite site and generate your own mobile version using a Firefox plugin called Highlight. This ‘mobilified’ version can be cached on an IBM server and updated as needed to give an even faster mobile experience.
As well as using heuristecs and clever algortithms to create a ‘best fit’ mobile version of a site, the system will use a browser plugin to let you define areas of the page to break off into so-called ‘pagelets’. The pplugin will ‘watch’ as you use a site and help you boil it down to just the elements you need.
Obviously, sites that rely on peppering pages with adverts might not be too keen on this approach, but it sounds like it could be great for the end user.
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