A Practical Guide to Nokia Browsers
S60 3rd Edition: Look ma…WebKit
In 2006 came S60 3rd Edition and the next big leap—a WebKit based browser. The first browsers of this series were called OSS 3.0, 3.1 and 3.2. These browsers supported HTML 4.01, CSS1/2 and JavaScript 1.5. This may not seem like much but for 2006, it was huge.
| Browser | Platform | #devices | Specification | Screen | Manipulation | Common devices |
| OSS 3.0 (2006) |
S60 3rd Ed, initial release | 18 |
|
| Non-touch | E50, E60, E61, E62, E65, E70, N71, N73, N77, N80, N91, N92, N93 |
| OSS 3.1 (2005-2008) |
S60 3rd Ed FP1 | 18 |
|
|
Non-touch | N95, E63, E66, N82, E71, E51, N81 8GB, N95 8GB, 6110, 5700, E90, 6121 Classic, 6120 Classic |
| OSS 3.2 (2008-present) |
S60 3rd Ed FP2 | 19 | Flash Lite 3.0 |
|
Non-touch | 6790 surge, 6760, N79, 5730 XpressMusic |
Practical advice
It’s relatively easy to support these 55 devices and doing so is well worth it as they are still popular in many markets, including Western Europe.
- From a rendering characteristic point of view, these browsers are excellent. CSS 2.1 support is good and very little optimisation is required for mark-up to render as expected.
- CSS 3 is not officially supported although you will find support for text-overflow, word-wrap, most of the multi-column module and a handful of selectors (including the substring matching attribute selectors).
- Specifying SVG using <embed> also works fairly reliably on OSS 3.1 and 3.2.
- Screen sizes are fairly uniform at 240 x 320 although you will find the odd early device at 176 x 208 and a few more experimental, double pixel density devices such as the E60 with a 362 x 416 pixel display.
Known issues
- Table row headers do not behave as expected. If focussing/selecting a row, any behaviour applied to the row will also be reflected in the row header. This bug is resolved in the 7.x browser series, but only on browsers that incorporate WebKit 525.
- If styling lists as block elements, you may need to specify both the list element height and its line-height for the expected value to be reflected.
- Early devices in this group can be slow with little available memory.
Recommended test devices
- Nokia N95, Nokia N73, N82, N79 and 6790 Surge in the U.S.
Stephanie is a designer and closet anthropologist with a passion for the many ways people interact with technology. With a diverse background, Stephanie's expertise lies in marrying design, technology and business goals to craft simple, elegant experiences. A compulsive researcher, Stephanie is always keen to discover and share insights on the mobile web and mobility trends in emerging economies.