[Non-Touchscreen Windows Mobile Other] Menneisyys:
1.1.3.3 Other bugs & problems

In addition to the already-mentioned ones (for example, the Open link: Tap default action settings’s not being sticky) it has several other bugs. For example, it sometimes hides the tabs (1 2) on QVGA devices (but not on 176*220 ones). This might particularly be a case with pages using frames, after maximizing one of these frames using Expand Frame (left softkey); for example, the MultiIE page itself.

The menus may be a bit messed up (but still usable) on QVGA devices because of the too large fonts. On low-res 176*220 ones, they’re OK (screenshots: 176*220: 1 2 3; QVGA: 1 2)

While the tabs can be re-displayed after a screen rotation (if the particular device supports rotating the screen – for example, the Vox does), rotating back to the original rotation will result in not using the entire screen estate. This won’t be an issue if you NEVER rotate the screen but stay in either Portrait or Landscape all the time.

As far as the options dialog screens are concerned, the “Plugin” dialog is also different: first, as it is lacking a scrollbar, you don’t see anything under Presets / Shown on open more menu on both 176*220 and QVGA Portrait phones. On QVGA Landscape ones, however, the scrollbar is displayed and you can scroll down, revealing the lowermost GUI widgets. Not that it’d be of any use: NONE of the features work in here. That is, you can’t even set the User-Agent to be used to “disguise” your browser as a full desktop Windows browser. This is also a very bad disadvantage, compared to how it behaves on the Pocket PC.

Still in this dialog, the address bar search configuration (PPC screenshots: 1 2) don’t work either: an “Option not available in alpha” is displayed.

1.1.3.4 Tips & tricks

By default, to view the source of a Web page, it tries to use \Windows\notes.exe, which doesn’t exist on any MS Smartphones.

Unfortunately (if you have a phone with a built-in keyboard – non-QWERTY phones don’t have this program!), if you redefine this link to \Windows\TextNotes.exe as can be seen in HERE, Menu / 9 MultiIE / 6(+) Page Tools / 3 View Source will not work either.

Therefore, if you have a Windows Mobile 6 Standard phone (which come with Office Mobile built-in), you’ll want to prefer Word Mobile (\Windows\pword.exe) to view the sources. To make this word, configure MultiIE to use it as the default viewer. With that, watching sources will work just fine:

1.1.3.5 Verdict

All in all, don’t expect much of the current version of MultiIE for Smartphone. It’s WAY worse, WAY harder to use and definitely more buggy than the Pocket PC version. The Smartphone version of Opera Mobile is far better thought-out (support for dialpad buttons; menu-based link / image context menu support etc., making it far easier to, for example, open a link in a new tab instead of the current one; far faster to switch tabs; allows for saving images etc.). If you, however, absolutely need to stick to IEM and do need a multitab solution for it with some goodies (for example, Opera Mobile still doesn’t support saving pages; MultiIE does; the same stands for quickly swapping between the three scrolling modes, should you want to exclusively use the D-pad for scrolling and leave the 2/8 phone buttons alone), currently, MultiIE is the only way to go.

1.2 Opera Mobile

(a QVGA screenshot; note that, as with IEM and Opera Mini, Opera Mobile is perfectly usable on low-resolution, 176*220 Smartphones too)

Currently, this really excellent browser is even more usable on the Smartphone than on most Pocket PC (that is, Pocket PC’s without a dialpad on the face of the phone – an example of PPC models with a dialpad is the ASUS P525) because of the functionality shortcuts assigned to these buttons. As has been pointed out in the Web Browsing Bible (which is a good read even for people that don’t own a Pocket PC), currently, it’s not possible to assign any otherwise assignable functionality – for example, page up/down, jump to beginning of page etc. – to Pocket PC hardware button. The situation is entirely different with the Smartphone platform.

This is all topped with the traditional Opera Mobile strengths: speed, standards compliance, being multi-tabbed (of course, tabs aren’t displayed in the SP version; however, it’s very easy to quickly (!) switch between loaded pages), no binary download-related problems, upload support etc.

There are some minor (!) bugs with the SP version, as opposed to the PPC one. These are in no way as bad as the problems with IEM, though.

The standard Smartphone "Back" button doesn't work in the cache setting text input field, which makes it impossible to change the value (other than adding, say, a new number in front of it, which is NOT recommended in any way for a reason I elaborate on later). The "Delete" key on built-in QWERTY keyboards (when they exist), on the other hand, do work. This is a minor problem on models with no built-in QWERTY thumb/keyboard. Tested on both the Vox (has a QWERTY keyboard) and the Oxygen (no keyboard). Note that you can always manually edit (with a file explorer tool) the Size value in the [Disk Cache] section of \Application Data\ Opera\ opera.ini if you want to change this value.

If your device runs WM6 (but NOT a previous operating systems - it's working just great on my WM5 AKU3 HTC Oxygen / s310!) and you want to use Opera Mobile as the default browser to, say, open links arriving in e-mails, the file associations won’t work with these URL’s as can be seen in HERE. The problem with the old PPC version 8.60 was the same, but the explanation and solution was completely different; this is why the old registry script (see THIS article) I’ve created for the latter doesn’t help with the Smartphone version.

Fortunately, after playing with the new, WM6 Registry, I pinpointed the problem and was able to come up with a real fix (yes, I was the first to fix this bug!). Just import THIS registry file (if you've installed Opera in the main storage; if it's on the storage card, use THIS instead) and voila: everything will be OK. (Just for the record: under WM6, as opposed to earlier operating systems (where this key didn't exist at all and the system used the traditional http association), HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\ Software\ Microsoft\ Shell\ Rai\ : DEFBROWSER \ 1 must contain the full executable path of the default browser, as opposed to its name (without the path) only. Two screenshots showing this, with the new contents (assuming Opera is installed in the main storage): 1 2.)

It's very important that this fix should also be used on the Pocket PC platform if you have WM6!