You might remember the stink that was raised last year when Vodafone decided to break the mobile web by using a transcoder that sent sites a user agent for a PC browser, rather than the proper user agent from their customers’ mobile browsers. This renders user-agent based auto-detection useless, undoing the hard work of developers and content providers that have made an effort to make their pages mobile-friendly. The justification provided by the transcoder’s vendor is that a machine can do a better job of “following the mobile best practices” than a human; it’s not hard to see the fallacy there.
Now, Dennis over at WAP Review has discovered that Sprint has begun using Openwave’s OpenWeb transcoder — and it, too, is sending funky user agents. The transcoder, instead of sending through the native agent from the device, sends “Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; OpenWeb 5.6.1.3-03) Opera 8.54″, breaking mobile auto-detection. Dennis also points out that unlike with other transcoding services like Mowser, there’s no way for a user to access the original, untranscoded content (an option even Vodafone supplies). He also reports that the transcoder slows down web browsing significantly on Sprint’s otherwise speedy EV-DO network, it reduces images size, and generates a lot of errors while browsing.
Sounds like a massive improvement on the mobile web experience then. The push behind transcoding stems from a desire to make the mobile browsing experience better by opening up more of the desktop web to normal mobile users. But that desire shouldn’t break the work of those who have actually bothered to create mobile sites tailored for mobile users, should it?
Update: Sprint says developers must ask for their mobile-friendly sites to be white-listed, and says it will automate the whitelisting process somehow in the near future.
Neither Sprint or the OpenWeb team wish to make life hard for mobile site developers and we are accelerating steps to remove this issue from the Open Internet deployment. Please bear with us for a short while as we get the exclusion lists up to strength and introduce OpenWeb 5.7 which automates mobile web site detection and lets through the phone user agent. Many thanks.
Thanks for the update, Ed.
Hi Ed,
Given that passing the real User-Agent through to the server - even in a secondary header - is utterly trivial to code, especially compared to the effort required to rehash any kind of page markup, why was it not in v1? That would have been 10 minutes well spent I think, and waiting until V5.7 seems a bit late.
How is it possible to work in the mobile industry, specifically in a company that has helped define the mobile browser, and yet be so completely ignorant of what the rest of the industry is doing and what they require to do that?
Unless of course Sprint specifically asked you to leave it out…
[…] to build an IMS monster, and the project doesn’t get dragged down in the general chaos. This isn’t encouraging though.Vodafone, meanwhile, was knocked back from buying the rest of Vodacom by the South African […]