Friday, November 20, 2009

Tiny yet amusing differences between Safari 4.0 for desktop and Safari for iPhone

Safari 4 for desktop and mobile Safari (mouse over for UA strings) are almost identical in their featureset. However, some testing of the HTML5 features shows where they differ. Tests were run here.
Feature
Desktop
Mobile
Comment
<VIDEO> H.264
Yes
Unsure
I believe this can be chalked up to the test's API failing to properly detect capability
Web workers
Yes
No
Probably an executive decision at Apple not to overtax Safari within the 128Mb it runs inside
Geolocation
No
Yes
There are several ways geolocation works; I surmise mobile Safari is borrowing the Skyhook methods among others
<INPUT type="range">
Yes
No
Given the absence of scrollbars on mobile Safari, the lacking range attribute value isn't surprising
@font-face
TTF/OTF
SVG
If I had to guess I'd probably say that malformed SVG is less likely to take down the rendering code than malformed TTFs