AJAX, Opera Mobile 8.6 and NetFront 3.3 compliance

I’ve been asked about the AJAX (Asynchronous JavaScript and XML; one of the hottest and most-spoken-of technologies around – it’s a Web development technique using XHTML and CSS that enables the creation of highly efficient interactive Web applications by shifting a significant amount of application logic to the end-user’s device, which means that Web pages do not have to reload entirely upon each end-user interaction) compliance of both Opera Mobile 8.6 and NetFront 3.3. I’ve made some very thorough tests with two widely known and used pages, Sink My Ship and Netvibes.

Unfortunately, Opera only has partial Ajax compliance and NetFront has even less. (Access only promises AJAX support for version 3.4 of Netfront – it’s still not known when it is released. At least in 10-12 months, I’d say, taking into account that Access releases new versions of their browsers once every one or two years.)

Opera is able to render the main page of Netvibes, but you can’t log in – that is, clicking the button doesn’t result in anything (the case is the same in the Sign Up dialog). With NetFront, the main page doesn’t even load.

Neither of the browsers are able to correctly render the chat frame, ongoing games and online user panes of Battleship as can be seen in here (Opera, with the desktop, working Internet Explorer in the background so that you can see what it should look like) and here (Netfront).

Verdict

Don’t expect (full) Ajax compliance from either NetFront or Opera Mobile. While the latter is more compliant, well-known pages like Netvibes won’t render correctly in Opera.