10.5. Leveraging the Web Browser

iPhone and iPod touch devices come with the Safari web browser, which is based on the growingly popular OpenSource WebKit engine. Most web sites that function properly in Safari for Mac OS X will also function appropriately in the mobile edition of the browser. However, there are a few key technologies that have not been implemented at the time of this writing. For example, SAML, the single sign on framework used by a number of large SharePoint Portal Server installations is not supported on the iPhone or iPod touch. We recommend that if you are going to be using web applications, such as Software as a Service (SaaS) providers or internal portals that you thoroughly test each business function (and field of each screen) to determine what may or may not need some fine tuning to work seamlessly for the iPhone and iPod touch. For that matter, we recommend the same thing for all of your supported mobile platforms.