Battle of the mobile web browsers!

Now that we have selected a winning device it was time to find the right web browser for the project. Android users are spoilt for choice when it comes to HTML5 compatible web browsers, with the default Android browser, Opera Mini, Opera Mobile and even a new Mozilla Firefox Beta in the works. The pivotal criteria for the project being geo-location, it was crucial that the browser had support for the geo-location API's of HTML5.

While all the above browsers claim to have such support, it wasn't until we got an Xperia into the lab that we could actually put this to the test with a real world demo. We quickly learned that the native web browser on the Xperia X10 running Android OS 2.1 was incapable of even rendering the embedded Google maps applet. Next we decided to trail Mozilla Firefox 4 for Android which is currently in beta 4. We got a little bit further rendering the map applet however the geo-location positioned us in St. Kilda, quite some distance from our humble Footscray office.

Lastly we tried Opera Mobile which is currently available from the Android Market. Almost instantly the page loaded with our location accurately displayed. So excited by the accuracy of the geo location I quickly ran outside to verify the results. Refreshing shop front by shop front Google accurately returned the address of where I was standing. I quickly ran back to the office to share the results with the team, we had our browser!