Trends in 2014: ReadWrite on Mobility

See also the tag Future and ReadWrite's predict series. 

Dan Rowinski starts this piece in ReadWrite by focusing on mobile-web sites -- e.g., sites often of the form mobile.___.___ or m.___.___ -- and moves on to his results for 2013 and, most important, his predictions for 2014: 

• No Apple TV set this year, again 
• Apple's iWatch arrives 
• Samsung's smartphone lead will decline. [I'm not so sure] 
• HTML5 ascends 
• Google Glass becomes a consumer product
• Android goes 64-bit 
• "Mobile" becomes ubiquitous 

In 2014, The Mobile Web Will Die—And Other Mobile Predictions

Also: Apple will release an iWatch, HTML5 will gain traction and Android will go 64-bit.

December 20, 2013 

In 2014, the mobile Web will die. That’s right, that bastardized version of the normal Web will crawl into a shallow grave and leave us all in peace. No more websites crippled with horrible “mobile.yourawfulwebsite.com” URLs. No more reading janky websites that display way too much fine print or omit crucial features when viewed on your smartphone or tablet.

The New York Times mobile site

How will we kill the mobile Web? Not with kindness, that’s for sure. The death of the mobile Web should be ruthless and efficient, coming on the backs of development, iteration and innovation. Google, Microsoft and Apple will lead the charge.

This year, we saw a lot of developmental gains in the browsers on mobile devices:

• Apple updated Safari in iOS 7 to be faster and more agile
• Google showed off its newest version of its Chrome browser at Google I/O in May this year to show the same website running on a PC, tablet and smartphone without a hitch
• Microsoft’s latest Internet Explorer in Windows 8.1 RT and Windows Phone 8 is the fastest and most diverse that the company has ever created
• Mozilla unleashed its Firefox OS on the world, a browser-based mobile operating system designed on the principles of HTML5.

The mobile Web will die because the companies that make the engines it ran upon are killing their mobile browsers and replacing them with fully functional versions that run on any device. In 2014, these browsers will be updated to put the final nail in its coffin.

In turn, developers will continue to build websites that can work across any screen size. Responsive design (what we do at ReadWrite to make the site look pretty everywhere) will continue to grow in 2014 as people realize that their old websites are losing them a lot of traffic from mobile devices.

That’s the prediction, at least. Now it's up to 2014 to prove me right.

Article continues at link above.