[General Topics] Menneisyys:
Unfortunately, if you are just a user and can’t ask a webmaster to return compressed (GZIP’ed) contents upon receiving requests from mobile clients but still want to (vastly) decrease your data usage, you’ll need to do some client-side work. There are two main categories of doing this.

The first group, largely consisting of the free Toonel and the commercial (between 30…50 US$ - cheaper for recurring customers) OnSpeed, runs a “proxy” on your Java-capable and/or Windows Mobile-based mobile device and configures (or, forces you to manually configure) your browser to access the Web through it. The proxy takes care of compression by being connected to another, invisible server. The advantage of this solution, compared to the next, is mainly that you 1. don’t need to pay attention to visiting a mediator Web page to do the conversion for you and 2. you will always receive full Web pages, not dumbed-down ones without, for example, scripting.

The second group consists of Web services like Skweezer, MobileLeap, Google Mobile etc. They are easier to initially set up than the apps in the first group (absolutely no need to install third-party apps on your mobile); however, they’re a bit harder to use and, as has already been pointed out, they can royally mess up Web pages. Most IEM plug-ins like MultiIE, PIEPlus and Webby automatically support the online services; the first two (Toonel / OnSpeed) can be used with all Windows Mobile Web browsers allowing for proxy usage (that is, everything except Opera Mini and TH – not a problem though as they’re content-stripped / compressed already).

Let’s turn to an entirely different subject: compliance with different (important) Web standards. Let’s start with AJAX, which is getting more and more ubiquitous. Opera Mobile and Minimo have the best support for it; the two screenshots show these (OM on the left, Minimo on the right) rendering the entirely AJAX-based Google Image.

Unfortunately, IEM is (still) pretty weak when it comes to AJAX support, even as of WM 6.1. So is NetFront as of the currently commercially available 3.3; fortunately, 3.4+ is already much better. (But, again, currently, there’re only restricted Technical Previews of 3.5 you may not want to use because of the restrictions). Thunderhawk and Opera Mini both have rather poor support.

JavaScript support is pretty similar to this. The bad JS support of IEM results in, for example, Yahoo Mail buttons’ not working – a major problem with many users. The same stands for for example address autocompletion in Google Mail; currently, only Opera Mobile and Minimo support it (they have the best JavaScript compliance).

Still on the subject of Web standards compliance, let’s take a look at the compatibility with CSS. In this area, Opera Mobile is without doubt the best as of version 9.xx. Version 8.65 (the one officially and commercially available; screenshot on the left) is a bit worse in this respect. Minimo is the second (screenshot on the right). The slide also shows how the desktop (9.x-series) Opera renders the test page (the only desktop browser to render it without any glitches – see the referenced article for more screenshots of other desktop browsers if interested).

Let’s go on with evaluating the CSS2 (Acid 2) test results. This slide shows how NetFront 3.3 and IEM render the test. As can clearly be seen, they (particularly IEM) have nothing to write home about.