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iPhone Questions

By Jason Grigsby

Published on June 15th, 2009

Topics

Here are some questions I’ve been asking iPhone owners:

  • Have you moved Safari icon off of the home screen onto one of the secondary screens?
  • Have you used Safari on your iPhone in the past week?
  • Have you used Safari on your iPhone in the past day?

If you own an iPhone, I’d love to hear your answers.

Comments

Mark Myers said:

I have not moved the Safari icon off of the home screen. I have used Safari in the past day, I primarily use it to run Google searches on the go, and do that on a fairly regular basis (several times per week). I have not used Safari to visit a website on my phone however, in quite some time.

David Frey said:

I have Safari placed on the bottom bar and probably use it once or twice a week via the icon.. though I can’t say I use it much for anything other than looking up something very specific, like a phone number or street address.

Jason Grigsby (Article Author ) said:

@marshallk No, I’m not expecting people to use a different browser.

The reason I ask that question—particularly when I’m giving presentations—is to point out how much the news coverage focus on the App Store obscures the reliable and repeat usage of the mobile browser.

The reason it is on my mind today is because of the article in Forbes entitled, iPhone Apps Turn The Web On Its Head.

To which I say, really? Are Apps really going to be the dominant way people interact with the Internet on mobile devices? Is that even true NOW?

Meg said:

I’ve only had an iPhone for a month, but I’ve used Safari at least once a day. The Facebook iPhone app fails to satisfy all my Facebooking needs, and Safari can help with that. And I’m also quite a bit of an IMDb addict and haven’t gone looking for an app to replace that site yet.

I don’t find Safari all that easy to use on the iPhone for regular web browsing, though. Because you have to zoom in to read most sites, and then you have to scroll right and left so much to read text. But so far, it’s working well enough that I’ve been using it and not moved yet to look for something that might work better.

Rick Turoczy said:

I have Safari on the bar, but honestly I tend to use Safari more through the bookmarks on my iPhone screens. But yes and yes on the other two questions.

For what it’s worth, I have Phone, Text, Safari, and Tweetie on the bar, in that order.

Chad Chapman said:

Me and Tiff use Safari on her Iphone. I noticed the apps for facebook and what not but seems like a wasted redundancy to me. I would rather just type in the sites i want when I want them versus cluttering with apps.

NO
Yes
Yes

Philip (flip) Kromer said:

Safari is still on the bar (along with the other defaults; I use them the most frequently).

I’m more likely to look something up directly in wikipanion if I know that’s where I’m headed but otherwise safari for me.

Kes Wold said:

No. Yes. Yes.

FWIW/off-topic but related, I turned JavaScript off so Safari would stop crashing (and help some pages, like the NYTimes, load much quicker.)

Downside: a few other sites (Flickr, some Google pages) don’t load or work properly without it.

Ken Westin said:

If Flash were available on the iPhone there would be little need for an app store in my opinion. Given the restrictive sandbox the iPhone SDK puts developers in, I am guessing that 80% of the apps available in the app store could be done in Flash or web based programming. Possibly a key reason Flash is not available for the iPhone ( sorry I specialize in conspiracy theories).