Our world is increasingly mobile, with over 4 billion mobile subscribers in the world at last count. Knowing that, and knowing that the world is only going to get more mobile, is one of the reasons I installed Alex King’s WP-Mobile plugin on this blog a few weeks back. The purpose of that plugin is to give mobile viewers a simplified view of the web pages at Keener Living.
Well, it turns out, according to this article from Google’s VP of Engineering for Mobile and Developer Products, mobile users don’t generally want a simplified view. Some do, of course.
But his stats show that most want their mobile browsers to give them the full web experience, complete with all the familiar javascript goodness. Now that I have an iPod Touch, and am thinking about getting an iPhone (AT&T is relaxing its 2-year rule for existing customers), I tend to agree with this view.
Given this interesting tidbit, and given that the subject plugin has caused some technical problems (including double-indexing of some pages by the search engines), I have suspended the plugin.
Also, virtually no major blogs use such plugins. TechCrunchIT, for example, the source of the above article, does not appear to use the plugin, nor does its big brother TechCrunch.
For the few of you who are disappointed, my apologies. I think most people will benefit from not having the plugin installed.