Database Info

Web Browsing News as of 10/18/2007: new Opera Mobile, Picsel, Spb Pocket Plus

A lot has happened in the last month on the Web browser scene. Let’s go over the news!
1. Opera Mobile 8.65 Final released!
Since this March, there have been two beta versions of Opera Mobile, without doubt the BEST, fastest and most standards compliant Web browser for the Windows Mobile platform. Now, almost half a year after the release of the first Beta, the final version has, finally, been released, of which I was also a (closed) betatester, working closely together with the developers and decision makers of Opera.
Compared to the 8.65 betas, which I thoroughly elaborated on in the Web Browsing Bible (and, therefore, in here, I don’t elaborate on these new features – make sure you read my roundup above), there are only few changes. There, on the other hand, have been several bugfixes; for example, the really annoying DEFBROWSER bug I’ve, independent of some other people doing the same, discovered and reported HERE).
Design decisions
Single column layout removed. This is a design decision I don’t really agree with. Particularly if you have a VGA device, you MAY find the lack of the single column mode annoying, particularly with sites / pages that, otherwise, would work much better with a well-working One Column mode. An example: a Wikipedia article in PIE’s One Column mode on a VGA device in Landscape mode (Largest charsize, High Resolution enabled) (the same with Fit to screen – as can be seen, it’s pretty much useless) and the same in Opera Mobile (Minimum font size: 8; Zoom: 100%). As can clearly be seen, One Column modes will ALWAYS be able to present more information. You can, of course, use zoom facilities so that the horizontal screen estate is fully filled in but, then, the character size will also grow and, what is worse, the images will also become pixelizated. (Also see THIS thread for more info / discussion.)
Desktop view, which has been made the default (!) viewing mode, has been made much friendlier. Now, it’s using a bit smaller characters than before. Should you still find them too big, switch to the default (fit to screen) viewing mode because setting Menu / Tools / Settings / Minimum font size to even 8 doesn’t seem to do the trick. Thanks to the, most of the time, excellently working new wrapping functionality, makes it possible to live without having to scroll around. This is shown in the following (VGA Landscape) screenshot with the View menu shown:
{
"lightbox_close": "Close",
"lightbox_next": "Next",
"lightbox_previous": "Previous",
"lightbox_error": "The requested content cannot be loaded. Please try again later.",
"lightbox_start_slideshow": "Start slideshow",
"lightbox_stop_slideshow": "Stop slideshow",
"lightbox_full_screen": "Full screen",
"lightbox_thumbnails": "Thumbnails",
"lightbox_download": "Download",
"lightbox_share": "Share",
"lightbox_zoom": "Zoom",
"lightbox_new_window": "New window",
"lightbox_toggle_sidebar": "Toggle sidebar"
}
Now, the cache is stored on the same drive as the executable program itself. While this is what many people have been asked for (particularly with devices only having 64 Mbytes of Flash ROM, meaning only 10-11 Mbytes of it available to the users – for example, the HTC Oxygen / s310 Smartphone is one of them –, you will definitely like this.
Note that, however, this approach might have negative consequences. As has been explained in my Web Browsing Bible, storing the browser cache on a slow-to-create-files-on storage card (most non-high-end cards are like this) may result in the slowdown of the page loading. If this is a concern to you (because you visit pages that contain a LOT of different images, which are all cached), make sure you manually (!) relocate the cache to somewhere else – or, for that matter, completely disable it in Menu / Tools / Settings / History / Cache Size as can be seen in HERE. To relocate it back to the main storage (or even a RAMdisk, if its being completely deleted each reset and the decrease of RAM memory isn’t a problem either because, for example, you use a 128M RAM model), just follow my previous Opera cache relocation tutorial.
Problems I’ve discovered and/or fixed in the meantime
On MS Smartphone (Windows Mobile Standard) phones, when you have really low RAM memory (you’re running out of it), problems may occur with keyboard shortcuts. Namely, no matter what hardware shortcut button you press, the same functionality (in general, Reload and / or Back) will be executed. This can lead to confusion – at first, it caused me a lot of headache too until I’ve understood how this all works.
All in all, if your hardware dialpad buttons don’t do what they’re supposed to do, you may want to shut down (some) other apps and / or Opera Mobile tabs. This will free up some RAM, which will result in the buttons working again.
There’s still no hardware application button support (you can only tie button shortcuts to dialpad / keyboard buttons), but now that I’ve published a FULL tutorial and explanation of all decent Windows Mobile button enhancers, including how you can configure your hardware buttons to simulate the pressing of numeric (dialpad) buttons, this isn’t that big an issue. Just make sure you read the Button Enhancer Bible and do what’s there.
There had been a problem with non-English operating systems because of the wired-in (English) directory names with the initial release. This, along with manually fixing it, has been fixed in the meantime; that is, current builds no longer have this problem.
Verdict
Opera Mobile is and, as it seems, definitely remaining the best browser for both Pocket PC’s and MS Smartphones. While there still are some glitches (the worst of them, the lack for hardware app buttons, having been fixed by me), these problems are nothing compared to the generic sluggishness and/or Web standards incompatibility with (most of) the other browsers. Make sure you get at least the trial version.
2. New (1.0.5) Picsel version released!
There is (see THIS) also a new version of the Picsel Web browser. To get it, download the CAB file here (mirror HERE). You only need to download the CAB file; you do NOT need to install the previous Picsel version first, no matter what is stated HERE
As opposed to some XDA-Dev folks, I haven’t found much improvement. For example, the CSS compliance is still very bad (the result of the Acid2 test is HERE; that of the CSS1 test is HERE). The Ajax compliance isn’t a tad better either (tested with THIS and THIS test suite).
All in all, there isn’t much improvement. You may still want to give it a try if you are a big fan of the GUI. I, myself, would still stick to either Opera Mini or Mobile. Don’t necessarily believe the hype

3. New Spb Pocket Plus
Spb Pocket Plus has always been one of the best Pocket PC (Windows Mobile Pro / Classic) system enhancers. The brand new, just released 4.0 version boasts, in addition to a lot of new functionalities, a, compared to the much less significant changes during the 2.x-3.x version jump, considerable
(screenshot showing the four tabs, all populated, and the drop-down list (now, only having one element) of the invisible tabs in the upper right corner. For comparison: a screenshot of the context menu of the old, 3.x-series version HERE, also showing there haven’t been any new buttons / any tabs in it.)
It has received the following niceties:
screen dragging mode; note that the autoscroll can be a bit of a pain in the back; it’s sometimes the best to disable it
tabs (with a pretty welcome context menu – very few other products have the same, as can also be seen in the “Tab context menu (if any)” row of the chart of the Web Browsing Bible)
adding the ability to switch off / on keyboard dragging in the context menu
a separate quick access button, next to the “Action” button of the address bar; note that “Search” here makes a quick Google search with the text you enter in the address field.
The settings screen has remained similarly simple – as you can see, there isn’t much to choose from. The same stands for Menu / Spb Pocket Plus, which didn’t change either as can be seen in HERE. As far as saving Web pages is concerned, you can still only save them as simple HTML files – no MHT or full HTML page saving is possible. Incidentally, as can also be seen in the last screenshot, the new SPP version has a system-level (not only available when saving pages, but from every app that would, otherwise, use the system-level, default, very dumb file dialog) file dialog box like that of Mad Programmer, whose FileDialogChanger I’ve often recommended. HERE’s a screenshot of the Setup program where you can en or disable it. (note that, as opposed to Mad Programmer’s FileDialogChanger, you can’t define exceptions – there’re no configuration capabilities of the new “File Open/Save Dialog”).
Compare this to the immense setting / menu options of PIEPlus or even MultiIE and you understand why I still recommend either of these for the serious Internet Explorer Mobile user, as opposed to Spb Pocket Plus. Not that SPP would be THAT bad any more.
It also has some bugs, but, knowing how great the Spb folks at bugfixing are, I’m pretty sure they’ll be fixed VERY soon:
clicking the cross in the upper right corner (to close the IE window) doesn’t work if there are more than one tabs open. You MUST manually bring up the Start menu and switch (in cases, re-run so that the execution is switched to it) to the program you want to. Of course, if you use a third-party task switcher (for example, the highly recommended Magic Button, PHM’s Alt-Tab or almost all the hardware app button enhancers reviewed HERE)
the smooth scrolling mode isn’t really doing what it’s supposed to: in Landscape mode, it’s, in general, scrolling more than it should or even scrolls multiple pages. Some people have also reported other problems with it; see for example THIS.
4. New version of jb5
In the MS Smartphone Web Browsing Bible, I’ve elaborated on the brand new web browser jb5, which, back then, only had a Smartphone version. Late August, a brand new, 5.0.79 version has been released for both the Smartphone and, now, the WM5+ Pocket PC’s. While it’s still having problems and I still consider it much inferior to Opera Mobile / Mini, if you need the special features (for example, in-page text search, which, on the Windows Mobile platform, is only supported by the currently unavailable NetFront and the memory hog & on several handheld models super-slow Minimo) jb5 offers, you might want to check it out. I’ll let you know as soon as it receives a really useful and recommended version.
5. Web Viewer for WM5
There is a brand new multitab IEM plug-in, “Web Viewer for WM5”, HERE.
Unfortunately, this title still has a lot of problems and, consequently, I don’t recommend it. As with jb5, I’ll announce when a useful, bug-free version is released. I also recommend the comments HERE.
6. Other stuff
In some of my earlier articles, I’ve already elaborated on two not really recommended newcomers: TeaShark and UCWEB. IMHO, it’s, currently, pretty useless to bother about these browsers. I’ll let you know when a considerably better version is released.

Menneisyys said:
All in all, there isn’t much improvement. You may still want to give it a try if you are a big fan of the GUI. I, myself, would still stick to either Opera Mini or Mobile. Don’t necessarily believe the hype
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
So it doesn't have any of the cool updated stuff found at the following link?
http://www.picsel.com/flash/uploads/index.html
May not be the best web browser ever, but the pdf and Office viewing is superb. I mean really, was adobe kidding with that awful LE edition?
NS

NotShorty said:
So it doesn't have any of the cool updated stuff found at the following link?
http://www.picsel.com/flash/uploads/index.html
May not be the best web browser ever, but the pdf and Office viewing is superb. I mean really, was adobe kidding with that awful LE edition?
NS
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
I've only compared the Web browsing fcuntionality.

When using Picsel on my phone and the rotate option, it rotates the browser window 90 counter-clockwise. Does anyone know how to change this to 90 clockwise? I ask because I use a P4000/Titan and it rotates the image away from the keyboard.
I've tried some of the registry entries, such as rotatedirection, but they didn't do anything.... or I put the wrong values

Web Browsing News as of 10/18/2007: new Opera Mobile, Picsel, Spb Pocket Plus

A lot has happened in the last month on the Web browser scene. Let’s go over the news!
1. Opera Mobile 8.65 Final released!
Since this March, there have been two beta versions of Opera Mobile, without doubt the BEST, fastest and most standards compliant Web browser for the Windows Mobile platform. Now, almost half a year after the release of the first Beta, the final version has, finally, been released, of which I was also a (closed) betatester, working closely together with the developers and decision makers of Opera.
Compared to the 8.65 betas, which I thoroughly elaborated on in the Web Browsing Bible (and, therefore, in here, I don’t elaborate on these new features – make sure you read my roundup above), there are only few changes. There, on the other hand, have been several bugfixes; for example, the really annoying DEFBROWSER bug I’ve, independent of some other people doing the same, discovered and reported HERE).
Design decisions
Single column layout removed. This is a design decision I don’t really agree with. Particularly if you have a VGA device, you MAY find the lack of the single column mode annoying, particularly with sites / pages that, otherwise, would work much better with a well-working One Column mode. An example: a Wikipedia article in PIE’s One Column mode on a VGA device in Landscape mode (Largest charsize, High Resolution enabled) (the same with Fit to screen – as can be seen, it’s pretty much useless) and the same in Opera Mobile (Minimum font size: 8; Zoom: 100%). As can clearly be seen, One Column modes will ALWAYS be able to present more information. You can, of course, use zoom facilities so that the horizontal screen estate is fully filled in but, then, the character size will also grow and, what is worse, the images will also become pixelizated. (Also see THIS thread for more info / discussion.)
Desktop view, which has been made the default (!) viewing mode, has been made much friendlier. Now, it’s using a bit smaller characters than before. Should you still find them too big, switch to the default (fit to screen) viewing mode because setting Menu / Tools / Settings / Minimum font size to even 8 doesn’t seem to do the trick. Thanks to the, most of the time, excellently working new wrapping functionality, makes it possible to live without having to scroll around. This is shown in the following (VGA Landscape) screenshot with the View menu shown:
{
"lightbox_close": "Close",
"lightbox_next": "Next",
"lightbox_previous": "Previous",
"lightbox_error": "The requested content cannot be loaded. Please try again later.",
"lightbox_start_slideshow": "Start slideshow",
"lightbox_stop_slideshow": "Stop slideshow",
"lightbox_full_screen": "Full screen",
"lightbox_thumbnails": "Thumbnails",
"lightbox_download": "Download",
"lightbox_share": "Share",
"lightbox_zoom": "Zoom",
"lightbox_new_window": "New window",
"lightbox_toggle_sidebar": "Toggle sidebar"
}
Now, the cache is stored on the same drive as the executable program itself. While this is what many people have been asked for (particularly with devices only having 64 Mbytes of Flash ROM, meaning only 10-11 Mbytes of it available to the users – for example, the HTC Oxygen / s310 Smartphone is one of them –, you will definitely like this.
Note that, however, this approach might have negative consequences. As has been explained in my Web Browsing Bible, storing the browser cache on a slow-to-create-files-on storage card (most non-high-end cards are like this) may result in the slowdown of the page loading. If this is a concern to you (because you visit pages that contain a LOT of different images, which are all cached), make sure you manually (!) relocate the cache to somewhere else – or, for that matter, completely disable it in Menu / Tools / Settings / History / Cache Size as can be seen in HERE. To relocate it back to the main storage (or even a RAMdisk, if its being completely deleted each reset and the decrease of RAM memory isn’t a problem either because, for example, you use a 128M RAM model), just follow my previous Opera cache relocation tutorial.
Problems I’ve discovered and/or fixed in the meantime
On MS Smartphone (Windows Mobile Standard) phones, when you have really low RAM memory (you’re running out of it), problems may occur with keyboard shortcuts. Namely, no matter what hardware shortcut button you press, the same functionality (in general, Reload and / or Back) will be executed. This can lead to confusion – at first, it caused me a lot of headache too until I’ve understood how this all works.
All in all, if your hardware dialpad buttons don’t do what they’re supposed to do, you may want to shut down (some) other apps and / or Opera Mobile tabs. This will free up some RAM, which will result in the buttons working again.
There’s still no hardware application button support (you can only tie button shortcuts to dialpad / keyboard buttons), but now that I’ve published a FULL tutorial and explanation of all decent Windows Mobile button enhancers, including how you can configure your hardware buttons to simulate the pressing of numeric (dialpad) buttons, this isn’t that big an issue. Just make sure you read the Button Enhancer Bible and do what’s there.
There had been a problem with non-English operating systems because of the wired-in (English) directory names with the initial release. This, along with manually fixing it, has been fixed in the meantime; that is, current builds no longer have this problem.
Verdict
Opera Mobile is and, as it seems, definitely remaining the best browser for both Pocket PC’s and MS Smartphones. While there still are some glitches (the worst of them, the lack for hardware app buttons, having been fixed by me), these problems are nothing compared to the generic sluggishness and/or Web standards incompatibility with (most of) the other browsers. Make sure you get at least the trial version.
2. New (1.0.5) Picsel version released!
There is (see THIS) also a new version of the Picsel Web browser.
As opposed to some XDA-Dev folks, I haven’t found much improvement. For example, the CSS compliance is still very bad (the result of the Acid2 test is HERE; that of the CSS1 test is HERE). The Ajax compliance isn’t a tad better either (tested with THIS and THIS test suite).
All in all, there isn’t much improvement. You may still want to give it a try if you are a big fan of the GUI. I, myself, would still stick to either Opera Mini or Mobile. Don’t necessarily believe the hype

3. New Spb Pocket Plus
Spb Pocket Plus has always been one of the best Pocket PC (Windows Mobile Pro / Classic) system enhancers. The brand new, just released 4.0 version boasts, in addition to a lot of new functionalities, a, compared to the much less significant changes during the 2.x-3.x version jump, considerable
(screenshot showing the four tabs, all populated, and the drop-down list (now, only having one element) of the invisible tabs in the upper right corner. For comparison: a screenshot of the context menu of the old, 3.x-series version HERE, also showing there haven’t been any new buttons / any tabs in it.)
It has received the following niceties:
screen dragging mode; note that the autoscroll can be a bit of a pain in the back; it’s sometimes the best to disable it
tabs (with a pretty welcome context menu – very few other products have the same, as can also be seen in the “Tab context menu (if any)” row of the chart of the Web Browsing Bible)
adding the ability to switch off / on keyboard dragging in the context menu
a separate quick access button, next to the “Action” button of the address bar; note that “Search” here makes a quick Google search with the text you enter in the address field.
The settings screen has remained similarly simple – as you can see, there isn’t much to choose from. The same stands for Menu / Spb Pocket Plus, which didn’t change either as can be seen in HERE. As far as saving Web pages is concerned, you can still only save them as simple HTML files – no MHT or full HTML page saving is possible. Incidentally, as can also be seen in the last screenshot, the new SPP version has a system-level (not only available when saving pages, but from every app that would, otherwise, use the system-level, default, very dumb file dialog) file dialog box like that of Mad Programmer, whose FileDialogChanger I’ve often recommended. HERE’s a screenshot of the Setup program where you can en or disable it. (note that, as opposed to Mad Programmer’s FileDialogChanger, you can’t define exceptions – there’re no configuration capabilities of the new “File Open/Save Dialog”).
Compare this to the immense setting / menu options of PIEPlus or even MultiIE and you understand why I still recommend either of these for the serious Internet Explorer Mobile user, as opposed to Spb Pocket Plus. Not that SPP would be THAT bad any more.
It also has some bugs, but, knowing how great the Spb folks at bugfixing are, I’m pretty sure they’ll be fixed VERY soon:
clicking the cross in the upper right corner (to close the IE window) doesn’t work if there are more than one tabs open. You MUST manually bring up the Start menu and switch (in cases, re-run so that the execution is switched to it) to the program you want to. Of course, if you use a third-party task switcher (for example, the highly recommended Magic Button, PHM’s Alt-Tab or almost all the hardware app button enhancers reviewed HERE)
the smooth scrolling mode isn’t really doing what it’s supposed to: in Landscape mode, it’s, in general, scrolling more than it should or even scrolls multiple pages. Some people have also reported other problems with it; see for example THIS.
4. New version of jb5
In the MS Smartphone Web Browsing Bible, I’ve elaborated on the brand new web browser jb5, which, back then, only had a Smartphone version. Late August, a brand new, 5.0.79 version has been released for both the Smartphone and, now, the WM5+ Pocket PC’s. While it’s still having problems and I still consider it much inferior to Opera Mobile / Mini, if you need the special features (for example, in-page text search, which, on the Windows Mobile platform, is only supported by the currently unavailable NetFront and the memory hog & on several handheld models super-slow Minimo) jb5 offers, you might want to check it out. I’ll let you know as soon as it receives a really useful and recommended version.
5. Web Viewer for WM5
There is a brand new multitab IEM plug-in, “Web Viewer for WM5”, HERE.
Unfortunately, this title still has a lot of problems and, consequently, I don’t recommend it. As with jb5, I’ll announce when a useful, bug-free version is released. I also recommend the comments HERE.
6. Other stuff
In some of my earlier articles, I’ve already elaborated on two not really recommended newcomers: TeaShark and UCWEB. IMHO, it’s, currently, pretty useless to bother about these browsers. I’ll let you know when a considerably better version is released.

SkyFire, a brand new and promising Web browser: (technical) review & comparison

As yet, I haven’t had the chance to give SkyFire, the latest Web browser a thorough try. Fortunately, I’ve recently got an account and could, at last, test it.
SkyFire is a client/server Web browser for both Windows Mobile platforms: touchscreen-enabled Pocket PC’s (in WM6+ parlance, Windows Mobile Classic and Pro devices) and touchscreen-less MS Smartphones (Windows Mobile Standard). It utilizes image-based transfer, just like the (cancelled) DeepFish and some non-Windows Mobile-based solutions like PocketSurfer 2.
Please note that this is NOT an in-depth review but a comparison to the other browsers out there. It’s immensely more useful for both end users (so that you can decide whether it’s at all worth getting an account or just wait for later versions) and the developers themselves. This also means you’ll want to read my past Web browsing-related articles to understand everything in this article as, at times, I’ll switch to „geek speech”. Start with my W3C presentation and follow the links back to, say, the Web Browsing Bibles. Also, search for „SkyFire” on my blog to find my earlier SkyFire-based posts – I’ve linked to several forum threads discussing the browser. In addition, In addition, I also recommend BrightHand's generic overview of the app - it offers a gentle introduction to SkyFire's capabilities, while, as has already been stated, my article is strictly a comparative, technical "geek speech" review targeted at more experienced Web users.
Note that the tests have been run on the latest 0.6.0.4503 version.
{
"lightbox_close": "Close",
"lightbox_next": "Next",
"lightbox_previous": "Previous",
"lightbox_error": "The requested content cannot be loaded. Please try again later.",
"lightbox_start_slideshow": "Start slideshow",
"lightbox_stop_slideshow": "Stop slideshow",
"lightbox_full_screen": "Full screen",
"lightbox_thumbnails": "Thumbnails",
"lightbox_download": "Download",
"lightbox_share": "Share",
"lightbox_zoom": "Zoom",
"lightbox_new_window": "New window",
"lightbox_toggle_sidebar": "Toggle sidebar"
}
A screenshot of the main menu; the Settings menu (as you can see, there aren’t much to set) is shown HERE.
Pros
- It uses the Firefox 2.x engine, which is clearly better than Internet Explorer, even as of version 8. That is, it’s just much more standards-compliant than IE-based client/server mobile browsers like PocketSurfer 2
- It works flawlessly over any kind of Internet connection; not just U.S. mobile phone operators (unlike what the SkyFire folks state – and the popular belief). The latter is only needed for registering for the first time. Fortunately, after moving to another country and even swapping your SIM card / switching to another device (from a, say, CDMA(2000) to a GSM/WCDMA one) , you can go on using your account: for re-activation on another phone, you won’t need to have an active U.S. phone number any more.
- web standard compliance-wise, pretty good, including even Ajax
- high-quality and high-compliance Flash and Java support (strictly in client/server model; sound emulation may not work on some models)
- URL history (as with most other browsers, though)
- Acceptable forward caching of approximately the following page (better than DeepFish used to be or that of PocketSurfer 2)
- The SmartFit mode works pretty OK and intelligently; I haven’t ever run into a situation when it didn’t failed to eliminate the need for horizontal scrolling. In this regard, it should be compared to Opera Mini 4+’s equally advanced text reformatting / reflowing algorithm in non-mobile view, (on non-high-res devices) zoomed in mode.
- In zoomed in mode, the cursor keys can be used for touchscreen-less link selection (and for scrolling in the four directions); in zoomed out mode, you can use it for scrolling the zoom-in window. That is, you don’t necessarily need to use your Pocket PC in two-hand mode – as is, of course, the case with the MS Smartphone (Windows Mobile 6 Standard) client.
- Compared to DeepFish: immensely better and faster. The only advantage of DeepFish was the support for hi-res on hi-res devices.
Cons:
- huge CPU usage when maximized (58% on a 624 MHz Xscale PXA270) independent of page contents (that is, it'll happen even with no Flash / animation taking place). When minimized, no CPU usage.
- no support for multiple tabs (documents), unlike in most comparable browsers. This means you’ll need to always reload a page, should you want to return to it and can’t just switch quickly (back) to other/older pages.
- no hi-res (for example, VGA) support – not only as far as the low-res contents is concerned, but also when rendering input fields; then, its coordinates will be effectively halved on a high-resolution screen. Fortunately, this doesn’t cause much problems with most pages.
- zoomed-out state provides pretty bad resolution / intelligibility (example HERE; incidentally, it also shows a message window showing a „connection lost” dialog)
- if you switch to another program and, then, back (with, say, an overridden app button), there are chances only half the screen will be used. A HTC Universal screenshot is HERE
- much as there’re (non-standard) scrollbars on the right / bottom edge of the screen (example HERE), they can’t be used to quickly position in the docs (the same problem as with Touch Browser)
- no page / link / image saving - of, for that matter, any kind of link / image context menus
- not any kind of copy/paste (however, you can copy / paste from/to text input fields, including the address field)
- can only click / activate links in zoomed-in state – in page view mode, you can’t do this. In this respect, most other browsers with zoom are better; particularly because, here, you also need to wait for the zoomed-in state to be loaded
- while „scroll down”, „scroll up” etc. button events are processed (unlike in some other browsers like Touch Browser), they are strictly mapped to the same functionality as that of the D-pad. This means you can’t quickly scroll up/down a page – you can only use the touchscreen to do that (also see the lack of quick positioning a page)
- no direct access to IEM favorites (favorites are online only)
- no niceties like accelerated scrolling (unlike with NetFront 3.5 or Touch Browser)
- while it does support some shortcut buttons (for example, 6 for SmartFit, 5 for Refresh, 2 for Enter address etc.), these shortcuts are in no way as useful as those of Opera Mini. Again, there are no ways of page scrolling, which would be highly useful.
- No goodies like User-Agent overriding or disabling images / Flash animation / Java applets.

Conformance tests:
(Note that most of these tests – except the ones that need some interaction with the client: for example, file up/download – produce exactly the same results as with the desktop version of Firefox. I, to be on the safe side, re-tested them.)
File download: didn’t download the 7.5M test file in 15 minutes - download has just stalled.
File upload: doesn’t work (the control is shown but it doesn’t work)
Compliance tests:
The new W3C test: not very bad
As you’ll also see, based on this and the User-Agent header, the engine clearly uses Firefox 2.0.0.11. I’ve tested this with the desktop 2.0.0.13 version (3b5 delivers worse results as can be seen in HERE) and got exactly the same results
Incidentally, I’ve also tested the just-released 3.0rc1 of Firefox to see whether it has fixed the compliance issues of the betas. The result is HERE and shows it is definitely better than the 3.0 betas – but not better than the 2.0.0.11+ series.)
Macromedia / Adobe Flash: works; client-server connection, much-much faster than in DeepFish / Thunderhawk animation.
As can be seen, even YouTube works. Sound didn’t work on my HTC Universal; other people at XDA-Developers, on the other hand, reported it working.
Frame tests (see the chart of my Bible for more info):
Maximal number of sub-framesets?: 2.html was the first to work; 1.html still didn’t. Pretty good, though, compared to the other browsers.
Max. number of parallel frames: no restriction, it seems
Frame boundaries aren’t settable; a frame in a (separate) tab / window isn’t viewable either.
Iframe support: works
Dynamic HTML forms / explicit form field disabling: supported
WAP: not supported
Acid2 test: much better than that of IEM
Java Applets: supported. A demo screenshot of the Animator Applet is HERE. Another demo; now, with Live Feedback ImageMap is HERE.
Incidentally, it’s worth noting the JPEG compression effects (blocks), which also show SkyFire uses exactly the same client/server model as Thunderhawk.
Ajax:
The two pages linked from AJAX: Getting Started: works
Google Image Labeler: works
Haven’t tested: caching (it has no caching, as with all the other client/server browsers not using for example separate images like Opera Mini or Thunderhawk). I haven’t tested full page loading speed (with my standard PPCMag test) either as the browser only receives the first about two pages upon loading a page; therefore, it’s impossible to benchmark the loading of the full page.
HTTP Headers: (also see THIS for the why’s of including them in here)
User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.8.1.11) Gecko/2007112718 Firefox/2.0.0.11
Accept: text/xml,application/xml,application/xhtml+xml,text/html;q=0.9,text/plain;q=0.8,image/png,*/*;q=0.5
Accept-Language: en-us,en;q=0.5
Accept-Encoding: gzip,deflate
Accept-Charset: ISO-8859-1,utf-8;q=0.7,*;q=0.7
Keep-Alive: 300
X-Skyfire-Version: THNWD_xxx.xxx.fixme
X-Skyfire-Screen: 240,320,240,296
X-Skyfire-Phone: Phone with crappy default browser # touchscreen
Via: 1.1 skyadmin.sjc1.skyfire.com:3128 (squid/2.6.STABLE6)
X-Forwarded-For: 10.100.120.119
Cache-Control: max-age=259200
Connection: keep-alive
Verdict
Client/server-based and, as opposed to the text-based Opera Mini and Thunderhawk, image transfer-based clients will always have the same advantages over purely client-based ones; most importantly, having access to a desktop Web browser on the server, with even Java applet support. The same stands for the disadvantages: they will always exhibit the same problems, pretty much independent of the time and effort spent on making them as sophisticated as possible.
Fortunately, SkyFire behaves pretty well in this respect. While it, in my opinion, hardly can be called a decent alternative to Opera Mini or Mobile (it still has a LOT of problems – for example, the unacceptably high idle (!) CPU usage – to fix and, again, the client/server image transfer-based networking model is pretty much restricted), it’s already much better than DeepFish has ever been and it even beats the native Pocket PC version of Thunderhawk in many respects (when it comes to, for example, Flash support). It is also much better than (some of – I can only speak about the ones that I’ve thoroughly tested at, say, MWC) the non-Windows Mobile-based mobile Web browser solutions like PocketSurfer 2.
While, I’m afraid, because of the networking model’s huge restrictions, it will never match „lightweight” browsers like Opera Mini or even Opera Mobile, it’s still nice to see there is some serious development producing even newer Web browsers.

Doesn't support high-res devices? I'm sure the developers said it would :/
I don't rate opera browser. It seems to crash and not render things well at all. Despises flash too. I hope they work out Skyfire for VGA devices.

I'm not sure of what you mean when you say that youtube works without sound, I;ve been using skyfire for quite a while now and youtube and all other flash based video sites work with sound. Other than that, great review!

Sound works for me, too. Video isn't so hot over 3G, and I haven't tried it on wifi yet, but should be really nice when AT&T bumps up the speed of 3G in June (or so the guy on the phone claims).

Does it support the CMWAP way？

thanks 4 the info mate , u r a legend !!!

nphil said:
I'm not sure of what you mean when you say that youtube works without sound, I;ve been using skyfire for quite a while now and youtube and all other flash based video sites work with sound. Other than that, great review!
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Thanks for the info; strange it doesn't work on my Universal... will try on my other devices.

mike freegan said:
Doesn't support high-res devices? I'm sure the developers said it would :/
I don't rate opera browser. It seems to crash and not render things well at all. Despises flash too. I hope they work out Skyfire for VGA devices.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
No hi-res on my Universal, just pixel-doubled cr*p. (Using the latest PPC version.)

skyfire issue
I received my invitation to download the software last thursday installed it playe with it for a while the next day tryed opening the program again it wouldnt let me every time I log in it gives me a message saying it lost network conection try again later havent been able tu use it since I wonder what the problem is I have an 8525 WM6 schaps rom I tryed skyfire support but they didnt respond to my message did I get banned? sorry if this is not the best place for this post

edwincito0_1 said:
I received my invitation to download the software last thursday installed it playe with it for a while the next day tryed opening the program again it wouldnt let me every time I log in it gives me a message saying it lost network conection try again later havent been able tu use it since I wonder what the problem is I have an 8525 WM6 schaps rom I tryed skyfire support but they didnt respond to my message did I get banned? sorry if this is not the best place for this post
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
disable the at&t proxy (if ur on at&t)
back on topic:
youtube works with sound on my phone....8525
good review tho...

Updated review posted.

edwincito0_1 said:
I received my invitation to download the software last thursday installed it playe with it for a while the next day tryed opening the program again it wouldnt let me every time I log in it gives me a message saying it lost network conection try again later havent been able tu use it since I wonder what the problem is I have an 8525 WM6 schaps rom I tryed skyfire support but they didnt respond to my message did I get banned? sorry if this is not the best place for this post
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
I have had this problem also intermittently. I just close it all the way, disconnect, and try again. I have had this happen probably 2-3 times. When it happens I usually have to relaunch the browser a few times and disconnect a few times also.

does anyone else have the issue of not being able to connect to internet with skyfire via wifi?

!Kernel Panic! said:
does anyone else have the issue of not being able to connect to internet with skyfire via wifi?
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
It works fine for me on my wizard. I just switched phones today (HTC TyTn/AT&T 8525) so getting it setup and all still.

The fact that it plays and renders video from any sites automatically make it better than Opera mini or JB5, Monk.

me too
youtube without sound
on any other vdeo webs also
is it bcoz of my phne is not compatible?
im using o2 atom pure running on stock wm5 624mhz overclocked processor.

MWC: Web Browser News (BOLT, Opera, Fennec, Iris, Skyfire, Flash)

Just like last year (see my previous year's article HERE), I have REALLY a lot to report on Web browsing, the just-announced stuff and so on.
Opera
1. At MWC, the Opera folks announced their brand new service called Opera Turbo (official page HERE), allowing for massive data usage savings and speedup, particularly over a slow (for example, GPRS) connection.
This isn’t (still) available to end users as it’s mobile operators that need to install the server-side component on their servers to do the data compression. This is quite a bit different from Opera Mini’s solution, which goes through the servers deployed and maintained by the Opera folks themselves.
You may ask why the Opera staff doesn’t maintain the same serverpark to serve Opera Turbo clients. The question seems to be easy to answer: it’d cause in a lot of additional traffic for Opera. With Opera Mini, the majority of this can be directly saved as the Web pages returned to the Opera Mini client are preformatted and stripped of for example dynamic (scripting) and CSS (styling) components. The internal page layout language is also much simpler than the “real” HTML used in everyday Web pages, resulting in further data usage saving. With fully fledged (non-simplified) clients, all this would be gone, meaning two-three times more data usage between the client machine and the Opera servers. Now, a significant (if I remember correctly, about 60%) of Norway’s Web traffic is caused by the Opera Mini servers – you can have an idea what this would become when every, say, second mobile user switched to using Opera Turbo on his or her laptop. No wonder they don’t offer the service to everyone - unlike with their Opera Mini -, but ask the individual mobile operators to deploy them. That is, it’s pretty silly to accuse of Opera of not being very user-friendly by not offering the service without a third party (in this case, mobile operators).
BTW, on desktop Windows, the service will only be compatible with Opera’s own (desktop) browser, not Internet Explorer or Firefox. It’s high time you switched to Opera on your desktop, though – Opera Link, particularly if you also use Opera Mini on your handhelds / handsets, is very hard to beat. And, hopefully, the, in my opinion, biggest problem of the Opera browser, the lack of auto-completion will surely be fixed in the near future – I’ve asked the Opera folks to, finally, implement this (along with the italic support in Opera Mini) and they seem to listen to me.
2. Opera has just released a new version of their Opera Mobile 9.51b2 browser; now, together with Google Gears (see THIS for more info on what it’s about) support. It’s, as usual, available HERE (follow the “Windows Mobile 5/6 Pocket PC, version 9.51b2, Gears-enabled technical preview” link).
A quick note: if you don’t want to give up on the advantages of the current, latest version of Opera Mobile (that is, the Omnia build version) with all its goodies (text reflowing at every zoom level; easier zooming etc.), think twice before upgrading. Nevertheless, if you install it on the same Windows Mobile device, the two versions will happily co-exist and won’t interfere in each other’s operation. (They’re located in entirely different directories, have different icon links and temporary directories.)
Bolt
The famous developers (BitStream) of ThunderHawk, which used to be one of the most recommended browsers for Windows Mobile, particularly in the pre-WM2003SE days when it was pretty hard to switch the screen orientation to landscape (and no other browsers supporting rendering pages in this mode), now, at last, has a successor: BOLT.
While I did install it on my BlackBerry 8800 (my favourite Web browsing mobile device for quick lookups – for longer sessions, I prefer my iPhone 3G) when the first, closed beta arrived about a month ago, I found it best not to publish anything on it because, frankly, I found the scrolling speed plain slow compared to the pretty mature and very fast Opera Mini 4.2 on the same device and, now that I have a lot of work, I simply don’t want to publish reviews of half-baked products because these reviews get outdated very fast as, in general, software developers quickly fix the problems. (Note that it’s because of this that I haven’t really elaborated on the first, runnable Mozilla / Fennec build(s) for Windows Mobile either – I’ll wait until a version is released which is at least half as usable and stable as current Opera Mobile versions.)
I’ve thoroughly tested the new version announced and released at MWC and found it very good on all kinds of devices. I’ve tested it on the following ones:
QVGA – 320*240 – Landscape BlackBerry 8800,
VGA – 640 * 480 – HP iPAQ 210 with Jbed 3.1 (tested in both screen orientations) (Windows Mobile),
QVGA – 240*320 – Nokia N95 (Symbian S60).
Thanks for the excellent font set of BitStream, all the three
Some screenshots:
{
"lightbox_close": "Close",
"lightbox_next": "Next",
"lightbox_previous": "Previous",
"lightbox_error": "The requested content cannot be loaded. Please try again later.",
"lightbox_start_slideshow": "Start slideshow",
"lightbox_stop_slideshow": "Stop slideshow",
"lightbox_full_screen": "Full screen",
"lightbox_thumbnails": "Thumbnails",
"lightbox_download": "Download",
"lightbox_share": "Share",
"lightbox_zoom": "Zoom",
"lightbox_new_window": "New window",
"lightbox_toggle_sidebar": "Toggle sidebar"
}
(Windows Mobile VGA with XXLarge characters – see Settings / Magnification)
(Nokia N95 with default settings)
Note that it has everything a decent browser should need: page scrolling by 2/4/6/8; on touchscreen-enabled devices without hardware (left / right) softkeys (the HP 210 is one of them), tapping the bottom-most area of the screen brings up the menu; find text in page.
It surely has some (not very annoying) problems; for example, rendering the PPCMag Experts in Portrait mode on a QVGA device – in this case, the N95 – sometimes lead to invisible end of rows. This needs to be continuously – after every single Page downs –corrected, which is definitely a more time-consuming process than under Opera Mini 4.2, which uses a better “fit to screen” algorithm.
Also note that, as the browser is strictly based on the (8-bit) ASCII font set, it cannot render any non-ASCII characters. That is, while it can display all the characters in all Western languages, it fails doing the same with non-Western ones – there will always be some characters missing. This can’t be fixed, unless, as is explained in my dedicated article on internationalization issues, the Web administrators explicitly look for the User-Agent of Bolt and convert all the pages returned to ASCII.
Speed-wise, the new browser excelled. It’s definitely worth giving a try.
Finally, it also supports videos and animation. It can even play back YouTube contents by invoking the system-level, native Web browser to download the (into a very low-quality .3gp file – unfortunately, you can’t make the transcoder produce a better-quality file, not even at the expense of higher data usage) transcoded YouTube content and, then, invoke the system-level multimedia player to play it back. On the BlackBerry 8800 (running OS 4.5), where I tested this, I needed to manually invoke the latter – doing the same from Browser didn’t work. That is, you’ll need to save the transcoded .3gp file into the file system, start Media manually and search for the just-saved clip.

Fennec
The long-awaited Mozilla/Firefox port, after having been only available for the Linux-based Nokia Internet Tablets, has arrived to Windows Mobile (dedicated blog post HERE).
No, it’s still not worth getting it if all you want is a decent, capable browser – it’s really slow and full of bugs. (Remember the first versions of Minimo? It’s THAT bad. Note that I’m not stating the private, unofficial Minimo has anything to do with the officially backed-up Fennec – except for the same initial codebase –, just the fact that Fennec, as of the current version, ins plain useless for real-world usage.) For the time being, go for Opera Mobile, Mini, Skyfire or Bolt, depending on your needs.
Iris
After my last review of Iris, several new versions have been released. They are stated to be much faster / more stable. However, the GUI inconsistencies I’ve pointed out in the above review are still here (also see the comments for example HERE); that is, currently, I still don’t recommend this version unlike you absolutely don’t want to use the alternative ones.
Also read THIS for more info.
Skyfire
A new version, 0.9, was released a week ago. Compared to the version reviewed in my last generic roundup, the list of improvements include (see THIS for more info) Facebook, Twitter, RSS support, improved text reflowing (not that I would have found the previous versions bad in this respect) and (at last) compatibility with WVGA (800*480) and WQVGA (400*240) screens.
Adobe news: Flash Lite 3.1 for developers; full Flash 10 promised
If you know my dedicated article ("TUTORIAL: everything you need to know about Flash Lite 3 and playing back Flash web videos"), you know that, so far, there haven’t been an official version of Flash Lite 3.1 available to download.
In the meantime, Adobe has made the developer version available (more info). No, do not rush to download it unless you’re a developer – it will NOT work in your flash (lite) plugin-capable browser like the latest Omnia build or Internet Explorer. Yes, I’ve tested this. Hope the end user plug-in version is soon released.
Adobe has also announced they will release full (!!) Flash support for Symbian S60, Windows Mobile and Android this year. This is certainly very good news for everyone but iPhone folks – after all, Symbian and Android have never had any “full” Flash support and the latest Windows Mobile one is a highly outdated and slow version 7.

Thanks a lot mate
You´re the man!
great reviews

UPDATE (22/02/2009 10:34AM CET): : let me also present you a shot of the Opera booth at ShowStoppers. I hope you recognize the webpage shown ;-)

What's your take on the security for Opera Mini and Bolt for BlackBerry? I know it's not a WM question, but I see you used Bolt on your 8800. Just wondering, I thought I saw somewhere that OM wasn't a secure browser, I like it but it's got me nervous to use it.

Something I noticed..
Why is Opera Mobile 9.5 jerky (non smooth scrolling, vsync problem on the top left of the screen in landscape) on the HTC HD/Diamond/Pro and smooth as slik on the Xpéria (wich is the same god damn hardware..) and the Omnia etc...?
Xperia : http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rW124IUAPIs

Hmm it's a bit late for a response I guess, but here goes.
I played with Opera Turbo for a bit at MWC and wasn't too impressed. Most of the sites didn't load correctly. Ofcourse, this was perhaps a beta version and things may need improving.
Also I'm not clear on exactly the compression method used, but if it is just standard HTTP compression (sadly enough still not used by most webservers on the block) it's nothing new, I know several carriers who already implement this service on their side and there are several services available that offer this in non-transparent proxy form (apposed to the carriers doing this in transparant form).
However there are many possible improvements to be made over 'normal' HTTP compression, and I assume Opera is at least using some of the things I can come up with straight from the top of my head. Still, I'd be nice to know in more detail how this works - is it revolutionary, or just something old in a new jacket?
Looking forward to actually using this on my device, see how it works (hopefully better than the on the demo devices at the Opera stand at MWC)

MAK11 said:
Something I noticed..
Why is Opera Mobile 9.5 jerky (non smooth scrolling, vsync problem on the top left of the screen in landscape) on the HTC HD/Diamond/Pro and smooth as slik on the Xpéria (wich is the same god damn hardware..) and the Omnia etc...?
Xperia : http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rW124IUAPIs
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Please DO NOT DOUBLE POST
Respect the rules

I’ve just published a much more detailed comparison of BOLT and Opera Mini; see http://forum.xda-developers.com/showthread.php?p=3507951#post3507951

Web Browsing News & Reviews & Tips and Tricks (01/Mar/2010)

While there are very-very few new releases for Windows Mobile (almost all of the games and a lot of app/utility developers seem to have jumped ship and went straight for the iPhone), Web browsers seem to continuously receive love from app developers. At MWC (where I was also present), there have been even two major, new releases (the new Opera Mobile and BOLT).
I didn’t bother with looking up the links for my reviews of the previous Web browser versions listed. You may still want to take a look on them – just look around HERE.
Let’s start with Opera.
Opera has (lately) come out with new versions of their two browsers with largely the same interface (at least on touchscreen platforms; the non-touchscreen Opera Mini is vastly different; note that, with the new Opera Mobile beta, the touchscreen-less MS Smartphone aka Windows Mobile Standard has also received official support):
Opera Mobile 10 beta 3
It, now, also officially supports Flash Lite (up to now, this was only available through manual hacking and using unofficial versions), with an additional twist: it only shows them when they’re really needed; that is, a Flash-heavy web page won’t bring your phone to its knees. (See THIS for more info - linked from HERE)
Should you need an XDA-Devs one-tap installer with Flash Lite built-in (and a lot of other goodies like automatic rotation on some newer HTC phones with built-in accelerometers), download version 1.1 HERE (linked from HERE; official thread HERE). I’ve tested it (as with the official Opera Mobile 10b3) and found it excellent. If you need prompt support for Flash Lite, go for this distribution in the first place. Nevertheless, don’t forget that Flash Lite has pretty bad performance on everything not having an 1 GHz Snapdragon – don’t bother with, say, watching YouTube videos on a WinMo phone / PDA with a, say, 624 MHz XScale CPU. Use the alternatives – there are quite a lot – I’ve explained in my YouTube bible. Nevertheless, it can still be of great help with Flash sites otherwise not compatible with any other players (see my Flash Lite compatibility list HERE).
Opera Mini 5 beta2
The new, beta 2 version of Opera Mini 5 was released on 12/02/2009; see THIS for more info. It already supports a lot of goodies and is much-much better than the pretty much useless beta1.
There is a one-step all-in-one download package HERE, which, in addition to beta2, also has Jbed 20090216.5.1 bundled. Just start the CAB; it’ll set everything up – it’s an absolutely hassle-free install great for newbies. (On phoneless PDA’s, you will, of course, need the “dumb” Phone / SMS DLL’s for it to work.) After installing, a new Opera Mini icon will be displayed in Programs, along with the Java icon. The former can be used to even more quickly start the browser.
Note that, despite the bundled Jbed version is meant for QVGA devices (that is, it doesn’t have the necessary Registry hacks to make character sizes larger) works – with the largest chars – just great on large-screen WinMo VGA phones too. Now, on my test HP 214 VGA WinMo PDA, it’s working flawlessly (except for the still-lacking italic characters), unlike the first, barely-working beta of version 5. Even Opera Link is supported and working great. It also has a large on-screen keyboard taking up more than the bottom half of the screen, even in landscape mode, and pretty well usable with fingers on larger-screen devices.
Copying text from web pages also works great. Should you want to paste your text into an external program (e.g., Notes), do the following:
- Tap-and-hold the screen anywhere
- Select “Select Text” from the pop-up menu
- Select the text (with the stylus / your finger) you’d like to copy to the clipboard; when you finish selecting (raise the stylus / your finger from the screen), a context menu will appear. Select “Search With” from it.
- Tap-and-hold the text input field until the context menu is displayed; from it, select Fullscreen Edit.
- In the Fullscreen Edit (that is, the native text input / edit area of Jbed) mode, make sure the cursor is at the very end of the text (by default, it will be). Now, activate both Ctl and Shift on the on-screen keyboard (tap them once to change color) and, with the stylus, tap the beginning of the text. It’ll then be highlighted; now, on the on-screen keyboard, deactivate Shift and just tap C (while Ctl is still active) to copy the currently (!) selected text to the system clipboard. With this, it’ll become available for other apps, not only Opera Mini. (Note that Ctl + A, to select all text, doesn’t work; neither does the standard, stylus-based, standard text selection.)
You may ask why so many steps are needed. The answer is simple: we needed to switch to the full screen mode (native) editor because the in-app text copy didn’t make the text available for external apps, only Opera Mini itself. It was only by re-copying it from the full screen mode (native) editor that we could make it available for all the other, external apps.
Note that this method only works with MIDlet managers that do support copy/paste in their native text editor. Not all of them do (for example, the outdated TAO Intent couldn’t), as can also be seen in the “Text input: cut/paste?” row of THIS chart.
SkyFire 1.5
SkyFire has just come out with the new version of their excellent Web browser, SkyFire. (Press release HERE). The new version, among other things, supports high-resolution, that is, (W)VGA devices in that the text /images are no longer “blocky” or “pixelizated”, az opposed to previous versions.
I’ve thoroughly tested it on my HP iPAQ 210 and found it excellent. Even YouTube streaming went on acceptably over a 128 kbps DSL connection way-way away (in Finland). Now, I can only recommend the new version – if the lack of tabs isn’t a problem with you, you may like the new version very much. Of course, in my opinion, it isn’t better than, say, iCab Mobile (the best Web browser on the mobile Apple platforms) on an iPhone 3G S, despite what some pundits state.
NetFront 4.0 Concept Version
While Access no longer plans to offer their NetFront web browser to the general public (NetFront, officially, can only be purchased bundled with a phone), I have still tested the “concept” version (available for download HERE) of the latest, 4.0 version.
It, now, has six tabs, which is way more usable than the two of the previous concept (trial) versions. The Browser Settings has really been redesigned (most of the previous settings seem to have been completely removed). It also has a new “PC View” mode, which may be something similar to the “Desktop view” mode of Internet Explorer Mobile.
Unfortunately, unlike with the two Opera’s (both Mini and Mobile) or SkyFire, its usage is still very awkward with finger-only usage – it uses standard menus to, for example, switch to full screen mode. I’ve also continuously run into memory outage problems with large forum pages (say, with 500 posts) – NetFront has always used more memory to render Web pages than even Opera Mobile, let alone the even more memory-conscious Opera Mini.
Therefore, particularly given that the previous tree browsers are way better, quicker etc., I don’t recommend NetFront 4 at all – its days are simply over (as opposed to the “good old” PPC2k2 days, when it was the only alternative browser, along with Thunderhawk), it seems.
Bolt 1.70
This now-excellent Java-based browser has received a lot of goodies lately:
- Support for Russian has just been implemented; however, there’s no support for other non-Western languages (for example, Middle/Far-East or East-European) languages at all
- Widget support
- Copy/paste support. To make use of this, tap-and-hold the screen (or select Menu / Page Tools / Select Text) and select the text. (Note that you don’t need to make sure all of the text is inside the selection box – you can just draw a vertical line, it’ll still select all the surrounding text.) After finishing highlighting the text block, select Menu / Search (NOT Copy!). From then, do exactly the same as in the case of Opera Mini (Ctl + Shift – highlight; Ctl-C: copy to the system clipboard).
I’ve tested it, just like Opera Mini, on my HP iPAQ 210 running Jbed 20090216.5.1.
You can download Bolt from HERE.
This browser is also highly recommended – particularly if you don’t need multiple tabs (which it, unfortunately, still doesn’t support) and/or non-Western / Russian languages (Opera Mini is compatible with every language as long as you don’t use its “smallest”, custom and Western-only character set) and/or you absolutely need italic support, which Opera Mini isn’t capable of.
Firefox (Fennec) 1.0 alpha 3
I’ve also tested the latest (released in Sept 2009) alpha 3 of the official Firefox port, Fennec - which has nothing to do with the now-abandoned Minimo project. The browser is available HERE.
I’ve found the browser far from usable. In my tests done on the HP iPAQ 210, the browser always crashed (requiring a reset) after loading a page. The other, reviewed browsers didn’t exhibit this problem. Moreover, it was considerably slower than the other browsers. In a word, I in no way recommend this browser – for the time being, just stay away, there are waaaaay better browsers out there, some of them even for free. (Note that there may be different opinions on the usability of this version; see for example THIS).

netfront 4.o sucks......
i cannot even download a thing from it...
like 3.5 instead

Thanks Menneisyys!
Nice to see you around

Good old Web-Viewer v1.2.3 (30 March 2009)
Web Viewer for WM5/6
http://www.anbsoftware.co.uk/viewproduct.php?id=11
[C/P from the above webpage]
This program has been developed to give Windows Mobile users the facility to have a very useful and functional tabbed web browser. Other tabbed mobile web browsers are either bulky, slow, or not free. This program is entirely free to use and uses Pocket Internet Explorer to display the web pages.
v1.2 Features
Screenshots;
{
"lightbox_close": "Close",
"lightbox_next": "Next",
"lightbox_previous": "Previous",
"lightbox_error": "The requested content cannot be loaded. Please try again later.",
"lightbox_start_slideshow": "Start slideshow",
"lightbox_stop_slideshow": "Stop slideshow",
"lightbox_full_screen": "Full screen",
"lightbox_thumbnails": "Thumbnails",
"lightbox_download": "Download",
"lightbox_share": "Share",
"lightbox_zoom": "Zoom",
"lightbox_new_window": "New window",
"lightbox_toggle_sidebar": "Toggle sidebar"
}
* Option to save open tabs when closing
* Rotate screen
* Clear cache and cookies buttons
* Clear cache and cookies on exit options
* Increased 'F' (file menu) size for easier access
* Web page receives focus on selecting associated tab
* Added cut, copy, and paste to address bar
* Option to hide tab when only viewing one page
* Option to turn off acquiring title of page (speeds up page loading time)
* Save options on exit: full screen, view tabs, screen rotation, etc
* Multiple language support using an editable language file. Now supports Unicode.
Features
* Tabbed Browser
* Standard Navigation Buttons (Back, Forward, Refresh, Stop)
* Open links in new tab
* Duplicate tab
* View Source (customise external viewer/editor)
* Remember closed tabs
* Remember typed URLs
* Full Screen mode
* Hide Tabs Option (to increase viewing area)
* Various Tab Options (Close, Close Others, Reload All)
Notes
This software is NOT supported on Windows Mobile for SmartPhone.
This program has been developed using Microsoft .NET Compact Framework 2.0.7045.0, which is required to run it. Only this version will work as there are numerous bugs in previous versions, as well as this one, but this is the one that is most stable and enables the functionality to open new tabs.
Favourites are managed by Pocket Internet Explorer.
There is a known issue when navigating, the back/forward buttons do not function correctly (device dependant). For example, when you click on a link for the first time you should be allowed to "go back". However, due to bugs in Microsoft .NET Compact Framework 2.0 and the device this may not register correctly that you can "go back". However, there is a workaround, which is to go to another tab and then return. This then registers correctly. Alternatively, you can use the context menu to select 'Back'.
:END
I set Web-Viewer to \Windows\Favorites\
and use iexplore.exe to handle new favorites.
Have fun with this stable (103.5 Kb) superfast tabbed browser,
Senax

Great stuff Menneisyys. Opera all the way for me.

orb3000 said:
Thanks Menneisyys!
Nice to see you around
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Yeah, I've been very-very busy lately...

any info about UCWEB? it's a good browser too and come in windows mobile native so no need jbed anymore

Personally, I am happy with Opera 10.0 mobile... Like it a lot!
Scott

What about XScope browser...? The first thing that comes to mind when I use it is "Firefox mobile better be damn good or else."
This browser is one of the fastest out there for Android currently (some say it actually IS the fastest). It has tabbed browsing, ability to mod theme, a new way to zoom (dbl tap and move finger) and much much much more... Oh yeah it actually has FULL screen browsing. It hides the notification bar unless you enable it and hides the address bar unless you need it too.
If no one has used it I'd write a review with a few screenshots to post in here.
Let me know.

Enndr said:
What about XScope browser...? The first thing that comes to mind when I use it is "Firefox mobile better be damn good or else."
This browser is one of the fastest out there for Android currently (some say it actually IS the fastest). It has tabbed browsing, ability to mod theme, a new way to zoom (dbl tap and move finger) and much much much more... Oh yeah it actually has FULL screen browsing. It hides the notification bar unless you enable it and hides the address bar unless you need it too.
If no one has used it I'd write a review with a few screenshots to post in here.
Let me know.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Does it have a native WinMo version? I coulnd't find any track of it...

Right now its for Android only. I don't think this guy has plans to cross it over to other mobile operating systems but who knows.

Like it a lot!

good resource.

General
Hi everybody, I am a new member just joined the community
to share my knowledge with others.

opera is the best guys

General
Hi everybody, I am a new member just joined the community to share my knowledge with others. This is the best place to share our opinions. Good resource.
-annasmith
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Browser
Thanks to Menneisyys about the info, I'really lika opera and firefox by asianbraindotcom

:laugh: ucweb maybe:good:
---------- Post added at 08:53 AM ---------- Previous post was at 08:44 AM ----------
Novice
learn :fingers-crossed::fingers-crossed:

opera is the no. 1 in my opinion

Personally, I am happy with Opera 10.0 mobile... Like it a lot!