Twitter’s mobile web page broken for WP7 and IE9 is being blamed

What its meant to look like	What it really looks like

IE9 Mobile on Windows Phone 7.5 has been called a sub-par browser by Joshua Topolsky on the Verge most recent podcast, and it was mainly because Twitter’s mobile website looks like a WAP page at the moment.

Of course it did not always look that way. The rendering problems seems to have started about a month ago, and likely the style sheet is not being loaded properly.

While the uninformed and biased would blame it on IE9 Mobile being a bad browser (here’s looking at you Topolsky) the truth is that when Twitter made changes on their website they simply did not check if it broke Windows Phone rendering. No amazing new functionality has been added which the Windows Phone browser can not handle.

Of course the reason the Windows Phone browser suffered this issue in the first place is its small market share, but it takes some-one pretty stupid to blame it on the actual quality of the rendering engine.

Microsoft may want to get on the phone to Twitter to get this fixed, before this impression spreads.

Update:  Testing the mobile page in IE9, which is similarly affected, throws up error “SEC7113: CSS was ignored due to mime type mismatch “, an error which older versions of IE and other browsers are more forgiving about, but which IE9 is pretty strict about, which of course still makes it twitter’s fault for serving the wrong file type and also for not testing the mobile page on Windows Phone.