The iPhone monoculture

Lets not forget that Apple make it easy to develop and test using Webkit on iOS. Grabbing the simulator and testing it at native speeds is only a click or two away from the App Store.

Opera on the other hand seem to get it, by offering a webpage where you can get a feel for how your page will run: http://www.opera.com/developer/tools/mini/

If I want to test my website on a blackberry I first have to know which blackberry to test on ( http://cl.ly/3n3x0r0H2C2y0P1O3C3o ) to get the version, I then have to use Windows.

Finally a search for "Samsung Dolfin Emulator", admittedly the first time I've heard of the browser, turned up nothing. I found the dev tools on bada.com, though again, windows only.

It's a market share issue. How many people do you know who use a mobile Internet device that doesn't run iOS or Android? Exactly. If open webOS gets its shit together, maybe we'll have three mobile platforms instead of two.

The point is, they all use WebKit.

Mobile is a trendy thing to talk about, but a lot of people still think of the Web as a desktoppy place to be. If they start testing their apps on mobile as well, they aren't going to start by testing for Opera Mobile - they're going to test what people actually use (iOS and Android).

Opera on both the desktop and mobile and Firefox on mobile are in such a minority that it's not worth the QA time to test them or the developer time to fix them in many cases. This, of course, will continue to support an ecosystem where the only mobile UA that matters is WebKit.