Professional HTML5 Mobile Game Development

Surveying the Mobile Browser Landscape

Before the advent of the iPhone and Mobile Safari in 2007, web browsing on your phone was in a sad state of affairs, with only Opera offering a mobile browsing experience that didn’t view mobile browsing as a limited, menu-driven experience. In the years since, mobile browsers have become more capable, and the JavaScript engines on those browsers have become better by leaps and bounds.

What was unimaginable five years ago, that you could play the same web games on your phone as on your desktop browser, is slowly approaching reality with every new HTML5 game that pops on to the scene. Although the hardware is important, much like the situation on the desktop, the browser that runs on your target device is the most important arbiter of the features available.

WebKit: The Market Dominator

The good news is that unlike the desktop, the two dominant smartphone platforms—iOS and Android—have excellent mobile browsers. Even better, they both share the WebKit engine, which means that you can expect a comparable set of features and rendering engine between the two. WebKit isn’t the only mobile HTML5 browser in town, but WebKit browsers do make up more than 80% of mobile U.S. traffic as of December 2011, according to www. statcounter.com.

WebKit began its life as the KHTML rendering engine and KDE JavaScript engine (KJS) inside the open-source Konquerer web browser. Apple adopted (and forked) KHTML and KJS and rebranded them as WebCore and JavaScriptCore ...