Earlier this week Google announced a change to their mobile search results bringing in notifications to let a user know when results include pages that may not work on their devices. For example on a device that doesn’t support Flash Google will include a message with the result that says, “Uses Flash. May not work on your device.”
“A common annoyance for web users is when websites require browser technologies that are not supported by their device,” writes Google’s Keita Oda and Pierre Far. “When users access such pages, they may see nothing but a blank space or miss out a large portion of the page’s contents. Fortunately, making websites that work on all modern devices is not that hard: websites can use HTML5 since it is universally supported, sometimes exclusively, by all devices,” the Googlers say.
Frankly I love this idea. I can’t tell you how many times I have searched for something on my iPhone only to end up visiting a blank page because the site is still built in Flash. So hopefully this will push webmasters to update their websites to the latest technologies, and at the same time make all of our lives easier while we browse the internet.