Also sprach Ashar Voultoiz:
Our javascript tests are being run under TestSwarm [1] and we currently cover up most desktop browsers (thanks brion).
According to our squids stats [2], most of Wikimedia mobile traffic comes from the following browsers (sorted by popularity):
- Safari
- Android
- Opera
- Mozilla
- Blackberry
- Safari, Opera & Mozilla for mobile : they are probably mostly the same
as the desktop version. I have not found emulators for them.
Opera comes in two flavors for mobile devices: Opera Mini and Opera Mobile. Opera Mobile is, indeed, close to the desktop version in the sense that it runs the same display, javascript engine etc. on the device.
Opera Mini runs these engines in server parks in the fixed network and tranfers a binary representation to a small viewer on the device. We currently process around 60 billion pages per month and Wikipedia is typically in the top 10 lists in the top 20 countries we publish statistics for:
http://www.opera.com/smw/2011/05/
In the test swarm link you sent, Opera 10 and 11 are listed, but not Opera Mini (which is currently at version 6). Could it be that your sniffer doesn't pick up Opera Mini users?
http://toolserver.org/~krinkle/testswarm/
Here a sample UA string from a recent version of Opera Mini:
Opera/9.80 (Android; Opera Mini/6.24556/25.657; U; en) Presto/2.5.25 Version/10.54
And here's the Opera Mini emulator:
http://www.opera.com/mobile/demo/
While Wikipedia remains popular with Opera Mini users, there is a technical problem which limits the user experience. Wikipedia uses JavaScript to unfold sections in articles. Alas, executing JavaScript requires a rountrip to the server (the Opera Mini server, that is) which takes time and costs money. It would be better if articles were unfolded by default for Opera Mini users.
We can also provide code to achieve folding/ufolding without server roundtrips (this uses locally executed CSS extenstions instead of JavaScript).
Cheers,
-h&kon Håkon Wium Lie CTO °þe®ª howcome@opera.com http://people.opera.com/howcome