On Fragmentation...

[jadawgis732]

This was something I posted on my Facebook page so it is geared toward friends that aren't techies. So just excuse the explanatory tone if you can. Some comments would be great...

Tech analysts often talk about fragmentation among devices. For instance, because Android has to cater to so many different resolutions (480x320, 854x480, 960x540, 1280x720...etc) the Android ecosystem is fragmented, whereas with iPhone you have two resolutions: 480x320 and 960x640, the second being exactly double the first. This makes iOS more developer friendly and ordered. (I'm getting to my point).

Now that the new iPad is out at 2048x1536 (double the first two generations of 1024x768), you have a lot of developers rushing to upscale graphics for their apps. But the iPad isn't just an app-centric device, it is used primarily to browse the web. And here comes my point. The 2012 iPad is the first device with the ability to fragment the entire Internet!

When web designers design pages they basically try to keep everything within a 960px wide container, give or take a hundred pixels. When you browse the web with a new iPad, even in portrait that leaves about 300 pixels of whitespace on either side. In landscape you basically fill less then half of the width with content. This is going to be a problem. I just got my new iPad and haven't even begun to do heavy browsing with it, but I am betting I'll see a lot of upscaling going on!

 

[zerocool84]

Is your computer at home or work low rez or something? Barely noticing this now?

 

[runawayprisoner]

The bad thing is... on most websites, you won't notice 300px of whitespace to either side. They will most likely be scaled to fit the extra 300px. So suddenly, everything on the page is scaled by a 1.6x factor.

Depending on how close you are to the screen, and how well the original graphic was designed, the scaling will look noticeably bad.

But that's not the bad news. The bad news is that when you turn to landscape, it scales the content even more, so 960px is scaled to 2048px, or 2.13x their original size. At that scaling, everything will look bad regardless, except for texts, which are vectors.

I can confirm that this can become quite an issue on a number of websites. On lower res devices, it's not too annoying because there isn't enough pixels to show, but on the iPad 3, I'm surprised at how bad some websites actually look.

 

[smartpatrol]

I thought the new iPad reports its resolution as 1024x768

 

[runawayprisoner]

I thought the new iPad reports its resolution as 1024x768

No, it reports native 2048x1536. Most websites assume it's 1024x768 from the user agent, I think, and then they fit contents into 768 or 1024 pixels across, but the iPad 3 blows everything up by a factor of 2, and all of those graphics look like crap next to the super sharp texts.

 

[ilkhan]

Don't worry, the fact that people have been browsing the web on high res devices for years is totally irrelevant.

Apple hath invented high-res, and the iTard cultists shall proclaim it "revolutionary" to win favor with their buried god.

 

[bearxor]

Don't worry, the fact that people have been browsing the web on high res devices for years is totally irrelevant.

Apple hath invented high-res, and the iTard cultists shall proclaim it "revolutionary" to win favor with their buried god.

You know as well as I do the right word is 'resolutionary'.

 

[smartpatrol]

No, it reports native 2048x1536. Most websites assume it's 1024x768 from the user agent, I think, and then they fit contents into 768 or 1024 pixels across, but the iPad 3 blows everything up by a factor of 2, and all of those graphics look like crap next to the super sharp texts.

Yeah I see what you're saying now.

I haven't encountered anything like what TC describes, though. Every website I've seen seems to render as if it were 1024 pixels across. Yes, embedded images are noticeably less sharp than the text. I guess the only alternative would be to render at its native resolution and make everything really tiny.

I haven't seen a single website that renders with massive amounts of empty space on either side, the way they do on my 1920x1080 laptop screen.

And yes, this is definitely the most resolutionary device I have ever used I'm thrilled, but also a little intimidated, at entering this brave new >1024 pixel world that Apple bravely pioneered for us.

 

[jadawgis732]

Is your computer at home or work low rez or something? Barely noticing this now?

No, 2560x1600 at school dorm, 2 2048x1152's at home. Why? The web is still formatted primarily for 1280x1024 displays.

Anyway I read this recently and found it very informative:
"Web-browsing on any iOS-based device is often a less-than-satisfactory experience. Specifically, when it comes to pictures and images, the mobile version of Safari automatically downsamples any image when it hits the 1024-pixel limit. When an image exceeds that threshold, it's downsampled by every nth pixel, such that n is the smallest divisor that yields an image less than or equal to 1024 pixels."

Source: http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/ipad-3-benchmark-review,3156-5.html