[General Topics] Menneisyys:
1.5 Minimo (Mini Mozilla) 0.2

Minimo is another well-known, free browser for the platform. It has recently received a major version bump to 0.2, with greatly enhanced compatibility to some WM5+ models that were pretty slow when running previous versions of the browser. Unfortunately, the new version has also introduced some new bugs; most importantly, the VAST RAM memory usage. I'm pretty sure this will really soon be fixed; for the time being, you won't want to upgrade to version 0.2 unless you can guarantee you have at least 20 Mbytes of free RAM memory before starting Minimo. (Otherwise, it will just crash at either loading itself or loading large(r) pages.) Note that I'll definitely announce when the bug is fixed - just make sure you check out the updates to this Bible from time to time (or, alternatively, subscribe to the thread / article).

Minimo shares the CSS, JavaScript, frame etc. engine with the desktop version. This, in itself, is really cool and means it has excellent support for CSS and JavaScript (AJAX too!). It, however, isn't really feature-packed. While it does support multiple tabs, it doesn't support any kind of Flash / Java plug-ins, it sports no image saving, link copying etc. capabilities. Furthermore, it isn't the fastest Web browser around to load pages - even the latest, 0.2 version (which according to my benchmarks, is about 25% faster than the last 0.1x series Minimo, to load pages) is significantly slower than most other browsers, let alone the at least 3 times faster Opera Mobile. The speed difference is especially visible with pages linking in several sources - then, it might prove even five-six times slower than even PIE!

All in all, while this browser certainly has the potential, it's still not really ready for prime time particularly now that Opera Mobile 8.65 also has excellent support for most Web standards. While Opera Mobile is a commercial product, I think the major speed advantage, the support for Flash, the stability, the support for PIE favorites etc. all make it a much better alternative. If you're an advocate of free and/or open source software, however, make sure you check out the project.

1.6 ThunderHawk 2.10304

ThunderHawk, a decent, fast but pretty outdated browser recommended for QVGA users (but not for VGA or square-screen ones - ThunderHawk doesn't at all support the latter!), hasn't really received any upgrade lately either - except for a minor upgrade targeting Windows Mobile phones with a clamshell or slide-out keyboard (that is, left-handed landscape mode) and some (server-side) AJAX support in 2006. Otherwise, it's still the same browser as was in 2005. This means for example no high-resolution mode on VGA devices (I do NOT recommend this application to VGA users at all - images are too low-res and butt-ugly!), no text selection / copying, no even basic functionalities like image saving or link copying.

Its major strengths are as follows:

without any kind of “One Column”-type modes, it’s capable of displaying even multicolumn tables without problems

the server it uses strips all unnecessary HTML markup from the HTML files it sends, resulting in sometimes major bandwidth usage savings.

its memory consumption and speed is very good

It also has major flaws:

on VGA devices, it still uses QVGA resolution, which is particularly annoying with images/applets

it is only able to display Western characters – no Chinese, no Japanese, no Arabic, no Hebrew, not even East-European characters.

its persistent cookie handling is buggy

it doesn’t have a multi-tabbed mode – that is, you can only browse/load one HTML page a time

its monthly/yearly fee may be a bit on the steep side ($5.95/month or $50/year).

it doesn’t use any kind of local cache, which may result in far higher bandwidth usage than with browsers that have

it can’t use HTTP proxies – that is, you can’t use any further GZIP compression, unlike with all the other browsers (except Minimo). This may also be a big problem – see my bandwith consume-benchmarks here

it has absolutely no features like image saving, link copy, HTML page save; not even page content copying works

it no longer has a free 30-day trial. You need to shell out at least $5.95 (a month's subscription) to be able to give it a test ride.

much as its Java VM (a welcome addition to version 2.1) is pretty capable, it uses a special client/server model that makes a lot of applets very hard to use or even useless. (See for example this article on the Radar applet – using TH, not only map dragging/GUI handling are almost impossible, but also the labels are impossible to read.)

Please see the first version of this Bible for more information on the buggy cookie handling.

1.7 DeepFish

Microsoft's latest, some-days-old technology is pretty promising. It's based on the same principles as Nokia's S60 OSS browser, NetFront 3.4 and Opera's announced 9.x series for Windows Mobile: it lets for dynamically zooming in/out of a certain page section to make it easier-to-read.

You can sign up for the beta HERE; note that you’ll only get on a betatester list to be granted rights only later when Microsoft actually gets able to provide the thousands of would-be betatesters the necessary proxy server throughput capabilities.

As no client-side markup-based rendering takes place with DeepFish, it's vastly different from the two other proxy-based solutions (Opera Mini and Thunderhawk). The latter two render client-side Web markup code and, therefore, have, essentially, much lower bandwidth requirements and better responsiveness than DeepFish. They, however, can't really make use of the other advantages of local Web markup rendering due to the simplicity of both clients; that is, while a decent, fully-fledged Web browser has for example page saving, copy-to-clipboard etc. capabilities, these don't.

Unfortunately, currently, DeepFish not the fastest similar browser in this respect. Both Nokia's OSS and NetFront 3.4 are FAR faster at on-page navigation and zooming in / out. For example, it only takes a fraction of a second to completely zoom out in the latter to the page thumbnail view and, after quickly moving the page outline, it zooms back in also a second. Of course the two browsers use an entirely different architecture (NetFront has a full HTML renderer engine, while DeepFish "only" displays images of pages pre-rendered by the internal DeepFish server); still, usability and speed-wise, NetFront is still much more usable.

Note that DeepFish being really new, under development and lacking even basic support for JavaScript, Flash, AJAX, Java and similar Web technologies, I haven't included it in the comparison chart. Now, DeepFish is no more than a simple, Compact Framework 2-based (this, unfortunately, also has some speed-related consequences) clever image zooming-based client/server solution with minimal client-side tools (highlighting and clicking links). That is, I would have needed to put a "not supported" (-) almost everywhere in the chart regarding DeepFish.

I'll report on any news regarding this question in the future. Also, when DeepFish does mature and does receive additional functionalities common with most other browsing solutions, I'll include it in the chart.