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Ten iPhone Browser Improvements Steve Jobs Could Have Announced… But Didn’t

Since I’m now a total iPhone fan boy, I’m officially allowed to say that I was a little disappointed by the 1.1.3 firmware update announced on Tuesday at Macworld. I’m actually still running the 1.1.1 firmware, since I couldn’t find a freely available hack to unlock 1.1.2 for use here in the Czech Republic. In any case, there didn’t seem to be any compelling reason to upgrade to the previous version (what was in it again?). I’m sorry to say that the new release is a tad underwhelming as well (though I’m lusting for what a friend of mine has dubbed the “Airbook”, and the new Apple TV looks positively game-changing).

The iPhone browser, in particular, is ripe for an overhaul. Already it’s the only way to get the true unadulterated web in your pocket (unless you wear baggy cargo pants, in which case you could spring for an N800 as well), but this is Apple and I demand nothing less than perfection. Here are the first ten things that popped into my head.

1. Copy and paste

Yeah, I know, everyone is asking for this. A recent experience I had illustrates the need perfectly. I was in the airport trying to connect to the T-Mobile wifi hotspot. Since the Big T is my regular wireless carrier, I can request a login via SMS and have the charges tacked onto my phone bill. Unfortunately, the password is an implausibly long string of random letters, numbers and weird symbols. Without a clipboard (or pen and paper on hand), I was forced to memorize it, switch quickly over to the browser window and peck it in before I forgot it. Needless to say, this took me four increasingly frustrating attempts.

For those who haven’t seen it, this video gives a reasonable suggestion for how the feature could be implemented, as well as a cute reminder of the lengths to which Apple fanatics will go to demonstrate their obsession with the company and its products (right down to the Jobsian attire):

2. Flash

There are probably good technical reasons why Flash wasn’t included in the initial iPhone release. On the other hand, Adobe has Flash Lite, which is explicitly designed for devices with limited memory and processing power, and someone at Adobe told me that they had actually seen Flash (an early prototype, at least) running on the iPhone. I suspect that the motivation for this omission was strategic as well as technological. The fact that Apple has been touting MobileSafari as the phone’s application development platform suggests that it is planning a move into the Rich Internet Application space. This would put it in direct competition with Adobe.

Nonetheless, Flash has become an essential part of web infrastructure, too important to be used as a pawn in a corporate power play. What I mean by this is that without Flash support, I can’t play Scrabulous on my iPhone. That’s simply unacceptable. Or will Apple just go ahead and buy Adobe?

3. Better caching

It’s nice that Apple has made it possible to open multiple pages simultaneous in MobileSafari. But I want to be able to jump around between the pages at will, a habit that I’ve doubtless picked up from copious use of Firefox tabs. Often I want to look up something referenced in a page I’m reading, so I jump over to another tab before picking up where I’ve left off. On the iPhone, the old page is gone and has to reload. Like the lack of Flash, this is presumably a technical limitation, since holding web pages in memory takes up generous dollops of memory. Unfortunately it might be optimistic to hope for a fix in the current generation of the device.

4. Better scrolling

As you scroll down a long web page, the iPhone displays a translucent gray bar in the right margin to show you where you are. Nifty. But this is no use if you want to jump directly to the end of the page. Somehow it should be possible to grab the bar and drag it with your finger. I don’t know exactly how, but I’m sure Apple’s design geniuses can figure it out. In related news, tapping on the thin bar at the top of the screen opens the URL and search fields, but has the nasty side effect of scrolling all the way to the top of the document. This always seems to happen to me when I’m three quarters of the way through a massive article or blog post. The fact that there’s no way to scroll down quickly to where I was makes this doubly annoying.

5. Phone number editing

When the iPhone browser sees a string of digits that might be a phone number, it automatically turns it into a hyperlink. Tapping it calls up a dialog with two buttons: Call and Cancel. Oftentimes the number has (or lacks) a local prefix and requires some tweaking. The only way I’ve found to do this is to call the number, quickly hang up, go to the list of recent calls, add the number to my contacts and edit it there. Hardly ergonomic. What we need is an additional Edit button that lets the user modify the number before using it.

6. Offline storage

I’ve already said plenty about this. Perhaps I was a bit harsh in dismissing the new webmarks and jiggly homepage icons out of hand. They’ll be a whole whack more useful, however, when I can turn web pages into real apps that load from the disk and store their data locally.

7. Saving files to disk

The web isn’t just web pages. It’s frustrating that I can’t store files to disk for later use.

8. Make it faster

This is another “if only” type request. I realize that the slow page loading and rendering of the iPhone is inevitable with current technology in a device so small. It’s a miracle that they’ve achieved the very acceptable user experience that the phone does provide. But hey, this is my wish list, and I make churlish and unreasonable requests if I want to. After all, it often takes a good 20-30 seconds for a page to load to the point where I can start reading it.

9. Open pages in another window

When reading on the web, I don’t want to interrupt what I’m doing every time I come across an interesting link. On my desktop computer my finger is constantly twitching over the middle mouse button, which in Firefox opens a link in a new tab without leaving the current tab. When I’m done, I can go and read the pages I opened. (Or more likely I’ll move onto something else, leaving them to multiply uncontrollably until the TiVo anxiety gets too much for me and I close them unread.) Double-clicking on a link in the iPhone’s browser should do the same thing, opening the page in another window so I can read it later.

10. Sync bookmarks/pages with PC/Mac

As I mentioned, I’m a tab maniac and self-confessed information overload victim. What better way to save myself the inevitable pangs of regret I experience when I’m forced to institute a mass tab purge than to take the pages with me and read them on the go? It’s somewhat ironic that I can sync music, podcasts and even full-length movies to the iPhone, but I can’t copy over a handful of web pages (the storage requirements of which are trivial in comparison). I should be able to flag pages right in my desktop browser and have them copied to the iPhone’s disk next time I sync so I can read them at my leisure without having to download them again.