[General Topics] Menneisyys:
The same used to apply to image saving in operating system versions prior to WM5. Also, it has severe restrictions like absolutely no IFrame support in pre-WM6 versions and only supports displaying 12 (in WM6) and 10 (in pre-WM6) frames. In this regard (too) alternative, commercial browsers fare far better.

Its stability used to be pretty bad in pre-WM5 times too: it frequently crashed because of certain CSS constructs. I’ve found and published several such CSS constructs back then. This is, fortunately, no longer the case in WM5+.

The two screenshots show how the mobile version of the PPCMag blog and the desktop version of YLE’s (Finnish Broadcasting Company) main page is displayed on a high-resolution VGA device.

Historically, on high-res Windows Mobile models, IEM had the “pixel doubling” problem, meaning images were still rendered as low-res, with double their size. This was fixed in WM5 AKU 3.5 (in early 2007), which lets the users switch between “High-resolution” and the default standard mode. This, however, didn’t really help external applications making use of the IEM rendering engine to display HTML-formatted contents like CHM readers – they still render images with pixel doubling (and, unfortunately, charts too) on high-resolution devices.

Incidentally, when used as a plug-in, there is another source of problem. If you don’t close HTML tags right after the (last) word like in <i>foo </i>bar (as opposed to <i>foo</i> bar), then, the two (formatted and the next) words will be rendered without a space in between them. In the two screenshots presented in the article (a low-res QVGA and a high-res VGA one), I show the results of this “bad-formatted” construct. Note that in the expression “fox jumps over a lazy dog”, ‘fox jumps’ is rendered as one word only because its HTML source was like this: “<b>fox </b>jumps over a lazy dog” and not the recommended “<b>fox</b> jumps over a lazy dog”.

Let’s turn our attention to NetFront, a well-known commercial browser for Windows Mobile. While it’s a bit expensive ($30), it offers an excellent browsing experience – except for some (rather major) problems and bugs. For example, it has built-in Flash support, which is, unfortunately, weaker than that of Adobe / Macromedia used by both IEM and Opera Mobile (it has compatibility issues and severe CPU usage problems). It supports SVG (which is very commonly used in Japan’s 3G content networks) and also has a Java VM to run applets. The latter, unfortunately, is definitely weaker than that of CrEme, the best JVM available for Windows Mobile and, in cases (where there isn’t much animation / graphics involved), even the Java support of the traditional, non-MIDlet-based Thunderhawk. It supports multitabs but their number is, unfortunately, maximized (to five) – as opposed to IEM plug-ins, Minimo or the Operas. I just can’t understand the rationale for this restriction; after all, on a modern 128 Mbyte RAM device, dozens of Web pages can be stored in RAM for quick access / swith. It also has minimap support and, which is very important for many iPhone fans, iPhone-like acceleration when dragging the screen contents by a finger / the stylus.

It has, as of version 3.4 and 3.5 (not NOT previous versions!), has pretty good Ajax/ JavaScript/ CSS support and its rendering engine is definitely better than that of IEM.

The recent releases are as follows: 3.3 (Summer 2006; inferior); 3.4 (Fall 2007): OEM only; currently: 3.5 Technical Previews. This, unfortunately, means you can only get the outdated and (compared to later 3.4 and current 3.5 versions) pretty much incapable 3.3 if you plan to go for this browser. Unfortunately, the currently available 3.5 Technical Previews versions are pretty much limited: no more favorites than 10; no Java / Flash support; no more tabs than 2. In this regard, Opera Mobile and most IEM plug-ins with their 30-day unlimited trial is much better. I hope the NetFront developers consider this and unlock all the features of future Technical Previews, only leaving a timebomb in rendering the browser useless after a certain date. (Noone will set their clocks back – and suffer from the consequences – just to be able to run NetFront to save $30.)

Now, let’s take a deeper look at Minimo, the free and, unfortunately, discontinued (cancelled), unofficial Firefox port. Note that the already-announced official Firefox will be later released for Windows Mobile; currently, no release date is known.

It comes in two versions: 0.16 (for pre-WM5 devices) and 0.20 (for WM5+ only). It’s plain useless on some models because of speed problems and other bugs. On the ones that it doesn’t have model-specific problems, however, is a semi-decent alternative if you really want a free browser other than Opera Mini.

Being based on the Firefox engine, it has excellent scripting (including Ajax) and CSS support. Not as good as Opera Mobile 9.xx, though.

Now comes without doubt (as of version 9.xx) the best, fastest and most powerful standalone Web browser, Opera Mobile. It has excellent JS / Ajax support, almost 100% compatibility with all Web standards, particularly with version 9.33; it’s very fast at everything (loading pages, downloading files etc.), supports the standard Adobe / Macromedia Flash plug-in (unlike NetFront, which forces the user to rely on the built-in and definitely inferior Flash engine) and lets for opening any number of tabs, as opposed to NetFront or IEM without a plug-in. It (as of version 9.xx – but, unfortunately, not the currently commercially available 8.65) also has some other goodies like finding text in pages, which is not available in any IEM-based solutions, not even commercial ones.

Currently, it’s available in two versions: the official (8.65) and the preview (9.33 / 9.5), for both PPC’s and Smartphones. The latter, 9.xx-series has without doubt the best standards compliance of all browsers for Windows Mobile.