The W3C’s Mobile Web Test Suites Working Group has released their Web Compatibility Test for Mobile Browsers Version 2.  It’s at www.w3.org/2010/01/wctmb2/. This is a forward looking test that is designed to test HTML 5 capabilities that will drive the next generation of mobile Webapps including XmlHttpRequest, <canvas>, <input type=’date’>, contenteditable, Appcache,  <video>, <audio>, Web Workers, localStorage, sessionStorage and @font-face. Most mobile browsers don’t support many of these capabilities yet.

I tried the new test with all the mobile browsers that I had at my command .  The best result I got was a 67% pass rate using the Android Eclair (2.0) browser that comes with the  Cyanogenmod  4.2.14.1 ROM for the HTC Dream and Magic.

You can click though from the test to see a results page listing the scores for all tested browsers.  There are a lot of results for ringers (desktop browsers) listed with the Firefox 3.6 Beta (Namoroka) topping the charts with a score of 83.33%.

The highest scoring  mobile browser was Firefox Mobile (Fennec) 1.0 on Maemo with 75%, followed by my Android result of 67%, which was matched by the latest iPhone build.   I went through the results and removed all the desktop browsers and kept only the best results for each mobile browser and added my own tests to create the list below. Scores are rounded to the nearest whole number for consistency.

Interesting stuff. The top browsers from Android and Apple actually have support for a lot of  HTML5 features. The iPhone passed everything except contenteditable, geolocation,  <input type=’date’> and <video>. The failure on geolocation surprised me as I know the iPhone does expose a Location API in the browser. Maybe it doesn’t follow the standard that the W3C is testing against. The Android browser passed the geolocation and contenteditable tests but failed <input type=’date’> ,<video>, <audio> and @font-face. The other vendors including Palm and Opera, clearly have some work ahead of them. The proxy based browsers; Skyfire, Opera Mini, Bolt and UCWEB seem to be at a big disadvantage, it’s got to be difficult to support things like canvas and contenteditable with a browser that’s in the cloud rather than on the handset.

It looks like no one has tested any versions of Mobile Internet Explorer, Samsung Dolfin, NetFront or Obigo yet. If you’ve got one of these untested browsers please point it at www.w3.org/2010/01/wctmb2/ and submit the results.