When Facebook first filed for its IPO, it was clear, reading through the company’s risk factors that the company has a lot of vulnerability in the mobile department, though it has certainly been working hard to change that. In late February at Mobile World Congress, Facebook announced some new initiatives to improve its mobile ecosystem.
One of those initiatives was Ringmark, a new mobile browser test suite, which the company said it would donate to the W3C Mobile Web Platform Core Community Group, which consists of over 30 device manufacturers, carriers and developers. Today, Facebook announced that it is going ahead and open sourcing Ringmark altogether.
Anyone will be able to contribute tests to RingMark, and Facebook says it will soon contribute Ringmark tests to the group. “As we continue to build, we’ll continue to open source even more of this work,” says Facebook’s Matt Kelly.
“Ultimately, we believe that web technologies are important to the future of mobile and that we can help to make HTML5 a well-supported platform for mobile developers to build upon,” he says. “For those that are building with the web today, it’s a major hurdle to learn native technologies like Objective-C and Java: and we hope that an improved mobile web can unlock a large contingency of developers that could, and will, be developing for mobile.”
Ringmark, above all else, is designed to tackle the problem of fragmentation when it comes to the capabilities of mobile browsers. That’s where the W3C’s group comes in (and certainly the open sourcing).
Those interested in contributing are directed to do so via the GitHub Ringmark repository.
