[Device Reviews and Information] Menneisyys:
NetFront (NF for short), the alternative Web browser for the Pocket PC, is constantly evolving. It was in last summer that the last, 3.3 version has been released and, now, the first Technical Preview (TP for short) of the forthcoming, 3.4 version is out, with a lot of advertised new features; for example, AJAX support. No wonder I was more than eager to (thoroughly – after all, I’m also a HTTP / programming / AJAX megahacker / pro!) test it. Let’s take a look at how it compares to the previous version!

(Note that this is NOT a beginner's introduction to what NetFront is. Play some hours with it to discover it OR make sure you read my previous Web browsing-related articles to get a picture how previous versions compared to other Web browsers on the Pocket PC and what niceties and secrets it has.)

Availability

The download page is here; the product homepage here. Note that the list of restrictions has a mistake: “User Agent cannot be edited” is, fortunately, not true.

Also keep in mind that this version can only be used in January; this, fortunately, also means there will be a new TP version before the end of this month.

Two important notes: coexistence with NF 3.3 and WM5 only!

As with the 3.3 Technical Previews some 1-1.5 years ago, the new, 3.4 TP’s can safely co-exist with 3.3. That is, if you already have 3.3 on your device, you can still safely install the 3.4 TP version(s) on the same Pocket PC. They are completely independent of each other.

Furthermore, the current version is WM5 only. Sorry.

“Hacking”

Unfortunately, it’s not possible to hack the commercial 3.3 Java / Flash / SVG plug-ins into the 3.4 TP version. That is, for example, it’s not worth trying to create a registry import file to create the above-listed registry values in the registry.

The same stands for the User-Agents defined under HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\ ACCESS\NetFront34\UADataX – even if you import the UAData2… UAData7 subkeys, they won’t work.

There aren’t files to hack (by, for example, copying binary config files from 3.3) either

All in all, it’s not possible to hack the TP version to have the same functionality as the commercial one – don’t even try it.

Changes from version 3.3

In Menu / Tools / Browser Settings, the Misc tab has an additional “Enable Visual Bookmark” checkbox to en/disable the new Visual Bookmarks functionality (old 3.3 screenshot here). When it’s enabled (it is by default), this mode instead of the “boring” traditional bookmarks, a graphical representation is used. Unfortunately, this TP version doesn’t seem to save the thumbnails as yet, which makes this feature, for the time being, useless. That is, make sure you disable the by default enabled checkbox in the current version.

The Browser Settings dialog itself has also changed: now, it’s the right menu that has the tab names and tabs aren’t used any more. This way, it’s easier to access invisible tabs. (3.4 screenshot, 3.3 screenshot)

There is no “Security” tab any more; its contents have been transferred to a brand new “Security Settings” menu in the Tools menu. I don’t think it was a good move: after all, it’s very rarely used and, therefore, it’s better not to crowd often-used menus with submenus like this.

As far as the default settings are concerned, they’re the same; for example, in View / Advanced Settings, the default Courier is still not changed to a proportional font (you’ll want to do this first thing after the install; unfortunately, it’ll also result in another reboot). Similarly, General / Advancerd Settings / Software Keyboard / Auto pop-up is disabled by default. You will need to enable it if you want to enter anything in the Address Bar in full screen mode using any on-screen (not hardware keyboard based) input method. The only difference is that the contents of the “Range to hold decoded images” in View / Advanced Settings is changed from All to Viewport Only (with Margin).

In the protocol level, the “Mozilla/4.08 (PDA; NF33PPC3AR/1.0) NetFront/3.3" User-Agent HTTP request header value has been changed to "Mozilla/5.0 (PDA; NF34PPC/1.0) like Gecko NetFront/3.4" (see THIS for more info on all this.)

As far as the Registry is concerned, there are, naturally, no "ACCESS cvmplugin", "SVG" and "Shockwave Flash" values under HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\ ACCESS\NetFront34\ Plugins

In HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\ ACCESS\NetFront34\UAData*, the values of "Platform" ("Pocket PC" -> "Windows Mobile"), "AppVersion" ("3.3" -> "5.0 (Windows; en)") and "AppName" (“ACCESS NetFront" -> "Netscape") have all been been changed. They have, however, absolutely no effect on the HTTP headers passed. That is, just disregard the people that tell you to set any of the text input fields except for the User-Agent text input area.

Under HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\ ACCESS\NetFront34\BrowserPref, there are some new values related to the new Visual Bookmark feature (state; saving thumbnails): "VisualBookmarkSaveThumbnail" and "VisualBookmark". Also, there is two new values, "BrowserProfile" and "ScrollType"; "DOMDocumentAll", which was related to the in-memory HTML parsed representation, is gone.

In some cases, it’s more intelligent at rendering multi-column stuff in the Normal mode, with all settings being the same. For example, my Game-Over test page looks this in 3.4 and this in 3.3. The 3.4 rendition is indeed much better. (Incidentally, 3.3 TP versions (for example, 1.04) had problems with this page too – that is, they haven’t rendered the contents in Full rendering at all as can be seen in this screenshot. This is no longer a problem in the final version of 3.3.)

As opposed to 3.3, it has no longer problems with IHT. For example, my test IHT page is rendered correctly, as opposed to the 3.3 way of rendering (that is, not displaying the main article at all)

Fortunately, there's no change in the SmartSKey support either: it's working just great for full page scrolling, independent of what scrolling method is set in Misc / Cursor Key. That is, you can set the D-pad to link scroll mode (if you, for example, prefer one-handed navigation) and use the volume slider to scroll pages. Then, you get the best of both worlds. (Now, I wish Opera Mobile supported SmartSKey + volume slider-based scrolling!)

It, however, has some problems. For example, the Google ad is completely misplaced in 3.4 while it’s rendered OK in 3.3. Both, again, using exactly the same (Normal display mode) rendering settings. (This is a problem with ALL Game Over pages!) Switching to the Smart display mode (which isn't so important with 3.4 as was with 3.3) fixes this problem.