We at NPU have been instrumental in bringing new undisclosed changes and features of Windows Phone 8.1 GDR1 and you can read our latest post about Music + Video folders, hidable on-screen buttons, which we have posted exclusively. Now, Microsoft has detailed changes that GDR1 brings to Internet Explorer 11 and especially the improvements in the way it renders the lots of mobile webpages now.
So, above is a before-after scenario and one can see lots of improvement in rendering mobile Twitter webpage post Windows Phone 8.1 GDR1 update. Though, I personally keep my setting to “Desktop”, as IE 11 is really fast in rendering desktop pages, but the mobile web pages rendering really needed some help.
Microsoft mentions that they have even added non-standard web platform features for doing so.
Based on your feedback, we pursued a web experience for IE users consistent with what is available on iOS and Android devices – even where this meant we would be adding non-standard web platform features. We believe that this is a more pragmatic approach to running today’s less-standardised mobile web.
Unlike the mostly standards-based ‘desktop’ web, many modern mobile web pages were designed and built for iOS and the iPhone. This results in users of other devices often receiving a degraded experience.
The latest GDR1 update fixes issues broadly divided in five categories for IE 11,
- Faulty browser detection not recognising IE as a mobile browser and giving the desktop experience
- Using only old webkit-prefixed features that have been replaced by standards
- Using proprietary webkit-prefixed features for which there is no standard
- Using features that IE does not support with no graceful fall-back
- Running into interoperability bugs and implementation differences in IE
It is really good to see Microsoft going some distance to make the mobile web browsing experience much better for those who use mobile sites.
You can read all the Windows Phone 8.1 GDR1 details on our dedicated Windows Phone 8.1 GDR1 page.
