Nokia on the fence : semantic war
Nokia are playing the second browser war smartly, the aim I assume is to get the best browser engine for the mobile market, currently lead by a little company from Norway, who are behind the Opera web browser. Even if Opera is far superior to Pocket IE, Redmond still own the mind share of web developers, desktop or mobile. We as developers should care because Pocket IE like IE6 is a relic of the 1999 world wide web. It’s now 2005, handheld devices are smarter, and more capable yet web software and related web applications built for the mobile world remain limited or tied to one browser maker.
After getting involved with Opera, Nokia annouced plans to fully investigate a light but fully functional version of the Firefox web browser. Now it seems that Apple is pushing a version of KHTML for mobile content delivery. Webcore is Apple’s name for the KDE based engine that powers its new Safari browser, for MacOSX …… the choice for developers is endless, yet as I said before if it aint IE people don’t really want to know.
Microwho? One thing that baffled me about Pocket IE was the fact that it had a very laughable implementation of the stuff web developers take for granted, like background colours, the excuse was low powered devices, the other excuse was Microsoft got into deep too quickly, “new features” of Pocket IE packed punches such as “hey we’ve now got *bgcolor* support”. Right then we use background-color now 
I don’t do mobile, and it’s not hard to see why!
So with the iPaq packing more power (600Mhz, a far cry from the 13Mhz that kicked off the PDA revolution) how long will Pocket IE keep mobile web developers in the dark? And will mobile devices break the domination of an extreamly poor web delivery platform known as MSIE which is unshakable from the desktop market? Will web developers ever get one standard platform across all devices that keeps up with technological change and has support for recomendations that are 8 years old? It’s an interesting time for the semantic web to breakthrough, but perhaps it has taken nearly a decade to do so and that’s not a good advertisment for innovation as people unshackle from their desks and move to low power devices such as laptops/tablet PC’s and PDA’s plugged via wireless connections.
Can the likes of Symbian/Nokia Opera/Firefox/Safari shine some light into the dim world of the IE only web developer? The second browser war is currently stacking up with the next generation DVD war and the next generation console war and the next generation music platform. Who needs a war between terrorists when you have a war between technology to watch (and take part in) huh?