[General Topics] Menneisyys:
A lot has been changed after publishing my well-known Pocket PC Browser Bible (see the links in the final section) over a year ago. Windows Mobile 5 (WM5 for short) has hit the market with, on the engine level, vastly (and I really mean this!) improved Internet Explorer (ignore people that say the opposite - it's only at the GUI level that it hasn't changed much. The underlying engine is much better.) Minimo (which is a PDA port of the well-known, popular desktop browser Mozilla / Firefox) has been constantly improving and, now, it's really becoming a decent alternative to all the other Pocket PC browsers on many PDA models. So has Access' NetFront, the other alternate browser: there has been a major (3.3) release in the meantime. Last but not least, well-known multiplatform Web browser developer Opera AG has released no less than two Pocket PC-compliant browsers, Opera Mobile and Opera Mini, the former being, more or less, a Pocket PC browser based entirely on the desktop core, meaning superior compatibility with Web standards and the latter being a super-lightweight Web browser running even on a "dumb" Java mobile phone. It's only the developers (Bitstream) of Thunderhawk that haven't really done almost anything in the meantime (except for adding left-hand landscape support for HTC Wizard / Universal / TyTN etc. users).

This (and some additional bug reports & fixes I've promised for example for some AximSite forum members) made it necessary to completely rewrite the section on everything downloading- and resource saving-related.

This includes everything that results in a file saved to your PDA: saving the Web page you're browsing and would like to have a local (offline) copy of; an image in a page you'd also like to save to your PDA for further use or a file download (for example, an Over-The-Air (OTA) CAB installer file downloaded off a developer's homepage or a central CAB repository.)

Also, the article contains a lot of low-level compliance and bug reports. Very few people do know the HTTP protocol (the underlying protocol of the Web) inside out: the Windows Mobile community has the luck of having me as the resident expert on these questions. This means I also elaborate on HTTP compliance issues and also explain why some Web servers don't work with some current Pocket PC web browsers. This chapter will be a must particularly for the Opera, Microsoft, Bitstream and Access folks and everyone that would like to know why some web sites (for example, RapidShare) refuse to work with the browsers of these companies. This section also explains why you can't directly download .CAB files off certain Web sites when you use NetFront, Thunderhawk or Internet Explorer, unlike on your desktop. I provide a full list of the available solutions to these problems as well - that is, if you've ever had problems with CAB files not downloading in your Pocket PC Web browser, you'll find the solution in the third chapter.

Finally, I've made a LOT of new benchmarks on new WM5 devices / ROM versions to see how browsers behave on current devices and operating system versions and which one to choose if you want to download a file as quickly as possible.

Note that this review is in no way a complete overview / comparison of all the new, lately-introduced features of the available Web browsers. I'm still waiting for some new versions of some major Web browsers (for example, the official WM5 AKU3 Internet Explorer Mobile with, at last, vastly enhanced AJAX / JavaScript support); it's only after their debut that I'll publish a brand new, generic roundup. This roundup is all about saving something to the PDA, let it be a web page, an image or a file and discussing everything related to downloading files off the Web. You may want to check out the Web browser reviews I've published in the meantime - albeit not in an all-in-one, big roundup comparing all the new browser versions in one article, they contain all the information not contained in this article.

In the first chapter, I elaborate on generic resource saving capabilities like image saving, current Web page saving, link target saving and link copying - probably the most important areas of improvement in the last year. In the second and third chapters I elaborate more on strictly file saving issues; the second will be mainly of interest to people that want to have the best / fastest / most reliable HTTP (Web) download tool on their Pocket PC and the third will concentrate on compatibility issues and common problems. The latter will be a bit more technical than the first two chapters and explains on the protocol levels why some browsers are unable to download files off certain pages or for example doesn't offer the server-side name for a given downloaded file. It will be of paramount interest to affected Web browser developers (Microsoft, Opera, Bitstream and Access).

While the article is self-contained and, therefore, not necessarily requires the reader to read my earlier articles (most importantly, the Browser Bible), checking them out is still thoroughly recommended. Please consult the last, "Recommended links" chapter for the links.

1.	Generic browser resource saving capabilities

Most (no wonder these features are in high demand among computer users) Web browser users have at least once wanted to save resources off the Web to the local computer (here: a Pocket PC PDA).

1.1.	The three types of resources

Resources, as has already been pointed out, can be of three types on the Web (I use a slightly simplificated approach to be as clear as possible - that is, I don't include intricacies like how for example Flash animations or videos can be fetched from the Web. Consult for example this article on this question.):

images themselves contained in Web pages

web pages (HTML files) containing some text, links and inline images

files on the Web (for example ZIP and CAB files) you'd like to download.

On desktop browsers, you may already know how you can save these kinds of resources onto your computer.

1.1.1.	Images

For example, if you want to save a single image in the desktop version of Internet Explorer, you right-click the image and choose Save Image As in the context menu as can also be seen in this screenshot. (Note that, from now on, I link in a lot of screenshots like this; for brevity, I won't, in most cases, mention they're screenshots. Therefore, if you see a link in this article (including the comparison / feature charts), it will most probably be an image link that you will really want to click if you want to see in real what I'm referring to.)

1.1.2.	Web pages

The same stands for saving a Web page for offline access (or, when you know it'll change / will be removed and, consequently, want to save it before it happens). To do this inside the desktop Internet Explorer 7, just go to Page and choose Save As (or, in the previous - up to 6 - Internet Explorer versions, File / Save As). In there, you can name the file you're saving and can also change the format you're saving it in: an one-file, really useful Web Archive (.MHT) format, a single HTML without inline images or other related resources (for example, JavaScript or Style sheet includes) or full HTML's with all the related resources (which, then, will be put in a subdirectory of the target directory).

After saving a Web page, you can safely archive / transfer these files - all you will need to do to see them is clicking them. With non-MHT files (there is only one browser on the Pocket PC, NetFront, that does support MHT files), you can even use Pocket PC web browsers (except for the external server-based Opera Mini and Thunderhawk) to read your saved HTML files after transferring and clicking them in File Explorer on your Pocket PC. (Note that there are several other tools (non-browsers) on the Pocket PC to read local, offline HTML files, uBook and Mobipocket Reader being the two most important.)