‘Bye bye iPhone-optimized iGoogle
p2pnet news view | Mobiles:- “Question: Optimized igoogle for iphone gone! Keeps diverting to mobile version!”
“I used to be able to see my iphone optimized igoogle page by loading www.google.com/ig/i but now it keeps diverting to www.google.com/m/ig which doesn’t render for the iphone nearly as well!” – He went on.
“It loads rss feeds completely differently and you can’t scroll through all the feeds anymore without loading a new page! Anyone else have this issue? Just started doing this today 16/01/09″
Answer?
On Download Squad, “Last January, Google introduce a special iPhone optimized version of its iGoogle page,” says Christina Warren.
The story is quoted in the iPhone Blog (from whence came the pic on the right 
) under the headline, Google Dumps iGoogle for iPhone: Huhbuwhy?!
Back to Download Squad, “When Android launched on the T-Mobile G1 in October, its WebKit-based browser (WebKit is what powers Mobile Safari) also offered up the optimized iGoogle interface,” says Warren, adding »»»
Although the G1 and the iPhone are capable of displaying the full iGoogle interface (more or less, there are some issues with certain widgets), the nice thing about the optimized interface was that it really laid sections of the page, and especially news articles and search panes in a really attractive way.
A year later, the optimized version of the site is gone. Instead, iPhone user and Android users get treated to the same crappy mobile iGoogle interface that other phones suffer through.
So much for progress.
On Saturday morning, when the change went into effect, users started asking questions in the iGoogle discussions page withing Google Help. The response from Google employee Paul:
Hey everyone, I have an update for you. We’ve decided to direct iPhone users to the standard mobile iGoogle page. We’ve found that people hit iGoogle from lots of different phones — we want to ensure you’ll all see the same version.
Most or all of your existing content should translate over to the standard mobile version. The only exception would be any gadgets that aren’t compatible with most mobile browsers.
Now you iKnow.
Download Squad – WebKit optimized iGoogle gets canned, January 19, 2009
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January 22nd, 2009 at 11:06 am
This is a good thing! iPhone-optimized mobile sites look *terrible* on any other browser…