Safari on iPad: full or mobile browser?

Apple's suggested guidelines for web developers recommend that they update their user agent detection to distinguish between Safari on an iPhone from safari on an iPad. This should be pretty familiar for most web developers. [http://developer.apple.com/safari/library/technotes/tn2010/tn2262.html#SAFARI ON_IPAD_READINESS_CHECKLIST-1__TEST_YOUR_WEBSITE_ON_IPAD__AND_UPDATE_USER_AGENT_ DETECTION_CODE_IFNECESSARY]

But the original poster was asking about the end user experience... What are iPad users actually seeing.... And I think the answer to that, as I said above, is something that is far closer to a desktop experience than a mobile experience. You don't need to know anything about user agents to figure this out. Just pick up your iPad and start browsing.

This has nothing to do with the version of Safari in the iPad / iPhone.

Basically, when Safari tries to load data from a server, it gives the server information about the device and OS that is doing the querying. i.e. the iPhone will identify itself as an iPhone, and the iPad will identify itself as an iPad.

The web site that is being queried can either use that information to treat different devices differently, or it can just return the same page regardless of the device being used.

So, it is totally up to the web site what happens when an "iPad" is seen.

Ron

As a follow up, this is what a web site sees when the iPad requests data from it (this is the "User Agent" for the iPad Safari browser):

Mozilla/5.0 (iPad; U; CPU OS 3_2 like Mac OS X; en-us) AppleWebKit/531.21.10 (KHTML, like Gecko) version/4.0.4 Mobile/7B367 Safari/531.21.10

You can see that it is identified as an "iPad", but it also is identified as "Mobile" and "Safari". Some websites might be checking for those two strings and serving up the mobile version, while other websites might be smarter and notice that it is an iPad and serve the full version of a site.

Ron

It's not about what it can do, it's about what kind of sites it gets served by default, mobile or desktop - without the user having to manually select.

For example, goto google news ( http://news.google.com ). On an iPhone you get directed to the mobile version by default. On an iPad you get the "desktop" version.

Therefore, to the end user, Safari on the iPad feels more "desktopy."

Their server is sending you to a mobile site based on what os the device reports.
It has nothing to do with safari on the ipad or whether it can handle the site.
Many times if you scroll to the bottom, there is an option to go to the full site.

If you do not like being sent to the mobile site, send feedback to the site host telling them to cut it out.

The developer of the Atomic Web Browser tells me that the problem is that Apple changed the behavior in the web browser class between the iPhone and the iPad iterations of the OS. He says there's no work-around.

As far as I can tell, Safari on the iPad and Safari on the iPod Touch have essentially the same capabilities -- substantially less than those of OS X Safari.

Try espn. It will ask you to choose mobile or iPad.

It's not about what it can do, it's about what kind of sites it gets served by default, mobile or desktop - without the user having to manually select.

Yes, you can look at it that way. But I think that what it can do is not totally irrelevant. Getting the desktop version of google docs is not of any use when your "mobile" browser is still missing the ability to do what you want there.

http://discussions.apple.com/thread.jspa?messageID=11401756&#11401756

Tom Gewecke wrote:

far closer to a desktop experience than a mobile experience.

Aside from the the size of the screen, do you know of anything iPad Safari can do that iPhone Safari cannot?

I know of something the iPhone version can do that the iPad version ccan't:

If I use Safari on my iPod Touch and go to a page with an embedded map, I can do the two-finger zoom and reduce and the map will change accordingly. If I do this with the iPad version, the entire page enlarges or reduces.

Bad Apple.

far closer to a desktop experience than a mobile experience.

Aside from the the size of the screen, do you know of anything iPad Safari can do that iPhone Safari cannot?

If I use Safari on my iPod Touch and go to a page with an embedded map, I can do the two-finger zoom and reduce and the map will change accordingly. If I do this with the iPad version, the entire page enlarges or reduces.

Interesting, I hadn't noticed that yet.

Agreed. Just seemed like the original poster was coming at it from the what it feels like perspective.

I'm not getting redirected to mobile versions of any website I goto (so far). So in that sense its like a full web browser - which makes sense given the bigger screen.

Of course there is no Flash, which makes its feel a bit "mobile" but I have been amazed at how fast websites seem to be adopting html 5 for video. YouTube videos embeded on web pages all just play inline (they aren't laucnhing the YouTube app, they just play right on the page). And its not just Youtube. For the pages I visit video just seems to be working everywhere just like a real browser. 2 weeks ago that was NOT the case.

I hear google docs is broken (you can only read, not compose). But I don't use that.

So overall its feeling pretty much like a full web browser to me.

By the way, check out atomic browser for 99 cents. It has tabs (which is the one thing Safari is REALLY missing).