Facebook is making good on its promise to focus on the mobile space with a new version of its mobile site. The new site is intended to work seamlessly across a range of smart phones and feature phones. The company says that more than 250 million Facebook users, almost half of its user base, access the site via a mobile device.
The new site purportedly gets rid of all the glitches inherent in designing a site for “thousands of different devices with varying capabilities, screen sizes, keyboards, CSS and JavaScript support, underlying technologies and browser bugs.” Rather than serving a “lowest common denominator” site for each class of devices, the new mobile site will automatically serve the best version possible for each device, promises Facebook. The site’s UI framework is based on XHP, Javelin and WURFL, a detailed database mapping user agents to device capabilities.
