# Mobile Web Development – more than just small screens
There are a lot of people offering mobile web development, but in many cases their support for mobile devices starts and ends with “reactive” designs. While it is important to provide a quality experience for users of all sizes of screens, there is more to developing web sites and web apps for mobile devices than simply ensuring that everything fits on the screen.
## Smaller screen
One of the major differentiation between “mobile” devices and more traditional desktop/laptop browsers is undoubtably the screen size. “4K” monitors on laptop and desktop computers are quickly becoming the norm, and it’s becoming increasingly difficult to find a monitor that displays less than full HD (1920×1080).
Although mobile devices do ship with “full HD” displays, when these are presented to the mobile web browser their effective display size is sharply reduced, to provide “high DPI” displays. This ca
## Touch interface
Another major difference between “mobile” and “traditional” web browsing is the use of touchscreens, rather than a keyboard and mouse. Computer users have grown used to the “tool tip” style of inline help, where hovering the pointer over a screen element (or help icon) automatically causes a short help snippet to appear. On a touchscreen device, like a mobile phone or tablet, there is no “hover”, so accessing inline help needs to be handled differently.
How users interact with elements also differs – mouse users are used to right-clicking to bring up menus, and using scroll wheels. Touchscreen users don’t have these facilities, and instead have “long press” and pinch navigation. Multitouch support also makes things interesting, with the potential for different actions based on a single finger “click” versus a double or triple finger “click”
## Slower processing
## Slower Internet connections
This is one of the most important aspects of developing for the mobile web, and one which is rarely checked when approving a new system. Web developers usually live in a world of fast, always available Internet connections, and as such can forget to test their work against the reality of slow(er) mobile data connections. Even during acceptance testing, a website or app may be demonstrated on a device that’s connected to a fast WiFi network with a good Internet connection, which may not be the situation that real users find themselves in.
This issue is compounded by the fact that a common method of offering a reactive user interface
## Browser limits re: RAM,IndexDB