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New, 2.6 version of Pocket Internet Explorer plug-in Webby Released!

It was some months ago that the previous, 2.5 version of the Pocket Internet Explorer plug-in (enhancer) Webby was released. Now, the new, 2.6 version has just been released.
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I really recommend the above-linked article to see what the advantages and the disadvantages of the previous version were. Here, I “only” elaborate on the new features and whether the problems or, at least, missing functionality I’ve emphasized in the previous version(s) have been fixed / implemented.
Webby is available here. It requires CF2 to run (make sure you download and install SP1, NOT the old, original version), which also means it’s “only” compatible with WM2003+ devices (bad news for pre-WM2003 (PPC2k, PPC2k2) users).
It has two versions: a free, severely “dumbed-down” (two tabs at most, two buttons definable – hardly any good, particularly when compared to the generous 2-4-week fully functioning trials of all comparable products, except for the slightly less dumbed-down NetFront) and a full (Pro) version. The latter costs $20, which is, in my opinion, quite much compared to the price (and capabilities / speed / compatibility) of Opera Mobile, NetFront or PIEPlus, the best, highly recommended alternatives (not to mention the free Mozilla / Firefox port Minimo, which gets better and better all the time and, now, is a pretty decent alternative at least on WM5 devices), particularly taking into account that the new add-on extension mechanism (still) doesn’t work in Webby.
Pros; new functionality
Add-in modules
Probably they are the most important features of the new version. These (are supposed to) implement additional functionalities like the URL builder known from MultiIE / PIEPlus.
Their list can be found here. Note that you should only visit this page from either Opera or Mozilla / Firefox on your desktop computer; for IE, it only returns the first part of the page.
Installing them is (that is, is supposed to be) pretty easy: just go to the above-linked plug-in homepage from inside Webby (you can use the “Get More Extensions” link in the Extensions tab in Options) and click the extension you’d like to download and install. It’ll ask you whether it’s allowed to install it; after the install, you’ll need to restart the browser.
The problem with these extensions is that they (still?) don’t exist on the homepage of the developer. Webby states them to have been installed but, in reality, nothing is downloaded (you can also check this in the \Program Files\Webby\extensions\ directory in the file system of your Pocket PC if interested). To make sure I'm not missing something, here’s a HTTP-level communication trace (two pairs of requests from Webby / PIE and two 404 Not found answers (that is, there indeed isn't anything in there; not even the linked extensions remote folder!) from the server): 1 2 3 4.
That is, you will want to wait until this problem is fixed, which I’ll surely report of. In the meantime, don’t even try to download extensions - it's just a waste of time because nothing will be downloaded.
Button support
The second most important new feature (which I probably missed the most from earlier versions) is the hardware button support.
As can be seen in this and this screenshots, the most important functionality (Back/ Forward; Previous/Next tab, Close everything but the current one / the current only; Full Screen toggle) is accessible.
It only allows for configuring six buttons on all PPC models (with wildly varying number of buttons). It seems all Pocket PC developers should read all my articles as I’ve elaborated on how all the available hardware buttons can be (very easily!) read out of the Registry more than one year ago ( Where does the PPC Registry store button mapping info - a tutorial (alternatives: PPC Magazine, BrightHand; make sure you also follow the link to More Programmers'/Hackers' Stuff, along with some cool Pocket Loox 7xx Hold Button Tips: More on Pocket PC Hardware Buttons for more info.)
Unfortunately, there is no way of for example using the tap-and-hold buttons of the WM5-upgraded hx4700 or the Pocket Loox 720. It’s not possible to define additional functionality for WM5 softkeys, unlike in PIEPlus 2.0+ and MultiIE 4.0+ either. However, it’s possible to enable WM5 softkeys for menus as can be seen in here: 1 2. This is certainly good news.
Also, it should be noted that the free version only supports two button redefinitions.
Cons
View: One Column mode still not supported
One of my biggest grieves with the past versions was the native support for the One Column mode of the underlying PIE. Unfortunately, this hasn’t changed.
This means if you must work on the full (unstripped) version of a page and, therefore, can’t use any Web compression / content stripper / online cruncher service like Skweezer, MobileLeap, Google Mobile or WebWarper (the four services Webby 2.6 supports out of box), you may end up having to switch to the normal view mode, which will result in a need for horizontal scrolling on a LOT of pages. This is a VERY bad bug in Webby!
Lack of context menus
Unfortunately, there are still no image / link / page context menus as can be seen for example here (which shows clicking an image link will bring up the traditional PIE context menu and nothing else).
This means you need to access all advanced functionalities like link target saving from the main menus. It’s only saving images (in WM5 IEM’s; it’s not available in pre-WM5 PIE’s) that is accessible via the context menu – as with IEM. Please also consult the Download Bible for more info on all these questions.
Verdict
The plug-in architecture is indeed promising. Too bad it doesn’t work yet. Hope it’s only a temporary problem, which will be fixed really soon. When it’s fixed, I’ll return to testing and let you know about how these plug-ins fare agains the competition (for example, the Address Bar plug-in against PIEPlus / MultiIE's comparable capabilities).
Plug-in problem aside, I still don’t really recommend this title over the latest version of stand-alone browsers like Minimo, Opera Mobile or, to a lesser extent, NetFront or Thunderhawk.
The same stands for PIEPlus, which I consider currently by far the best PIE plug-in. The latter is just far more capable (just compare their capabilities one by one!) and faster (don’t be mislead by the seemingly small download times: Webby uses the compression / content stripping service Skweezer by default; this is why it seems to be faster than any else PIE plug-in by default) than Webby.
Recommended links
The Web Browsers category in the Smartphone & Pocket PC Magazine's Expert Blog

Web browsing news: new version of Opera Mobile and NetFront out with major upgrades

Anyone having read my well-known Windows Mobile Web Browser Bible know NetFront and Opera Mobile are leading Web browsers on Windows Mobile. Betas / Technical Previews of forthcoming versions (3.4 for NetFront and 8.65 for Opera Mobile) have been constantly released; the last ones, of both browsers, recently. In this article, I elaborate on these brand new versions.
NetFront 3.4 Technical Previews 007
NetFront, while not really having gained new features (except for support for Flash), has been enhanced: now, the current, free (!) Technical Preview isn’t less usable than the commercial version (except for some, for most of the users, not THAT important, really advanced plug-ins like the Java Virtual Machine). This means you can have a fully-fledged Web browser without having to shell out any money – as is exactly the case with the new Opera Mobile, to be discussed below – till 08/31/2007 (it only expires then).
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Getting and installing
Download the CAB file HERE (the main TP page is HERE).
Pros
No longer requires a lengthy initial setup (involving even a soft reset) phase at the first start or when you switch to proportional fonts
You’re no longer restricted to 10 bookmarks (favorites) in the TP version
It no longer restricts the number of the tabs to be opened to two either
The TP version too supports Flash as can be seen in for example HERE (showing Bomberman). It’s even capable of playing YouTube videos as can be seen in HERE. Unfortunately, its YouTube playback is WAY slower (that is, pretty useless) than that of Opera Mobile or, for that matter, the latest TCPMP Flash plug-in (of which I’ll soon publish an article), therefore, should be avoided. If you DO want to enable it, go to Menu / Tools / Browser Settings / External Tools / Plug-in and enable the given checkbox as can be seen in HERE.
Cons
Unfortunately, when you open a link in a new tab, the current settings (for example, rendering / one-column / image display mode) aren’t inherited, as opposed to ALL the other (decent) multitab-enabled browsers on both the desktop Windows and Windows Mobile. Sure, you can quickly apply pre-defined profiles at Menu / View Profile, but it’ll take a LOT of time to re-render the pages. Inheriting view settings would have been the best way to go.
The 5-tab restriction is still here (you can’t open more than five tabs at a time)
The Flash plug-in is as bad (CPU usage-wise) as was in version 3.3 (you will want to keep it deactivated in order to avoid your handheld to really slow down)
No MS Smartphone (WM6 Standard)-compliance: while the CAB installer can be installed on a WM5+ Smartphone, the main GUI isn’t displayed when you start the browser. (tested on the HTC Vox/s710 in both orientations)
Not compliant with WM operating systems prior to WM5
You must still manually switch to proportional fonts in Menu / Tools / Browser Settings / General / Font / Use proportional font (don’t forget to do this!)
Opera Mobile 8.65 beta 2
In my opinion, the best Windows Mobile Web browser, particularly on the Smartphone, is Opera Mobile. The new beta has recently been released and is available HERE for free (!), unrestricted (!) download. The major update is it no longer having driver memory problems (see my previous reviews of these problems) and is, therefore, a must install. To my knowledge, there aren’t other new features.
The trial expires on 10/01/2007 – that is, you can surf the Net for free until then. I, however, recommend going and buying a license – Opera certainly deserves the support, not only because Opera Mobile, but also their top-notch desktop Opera browser and Opera Mini.
The Smartphone (Windows Mobile Standard) version of Opera Mobile is a REAL must – way better than anything else. I’ll publish a big upgrade of the Windows Mobile Web Browser Bible, concerning Web browsing on the Smartphone, in the near future.

in netfront i can't find any progressbar or similar indicator for the current status of a loading page. is there something like that or doesn't netfront provide this feature?
edit: i will try netfront for some days. compared to opera mobile 8.65beta it seems that netfront offers an more acceptable browsing experience without changing a page's layout to one column on my qvga device(page overview and virtual canvas).
but opera mobile's one column view looks better than netfront's.

Multiplatform Web browser W3C compliance report

Now that I’m working on my 45-minute speech & demo for my (international) W3C speech next week, I’ve re-tested the latest version of all browsers with the just-published, new W3C test suite specifically targeted at mobile devices. The greener, the better; red denotes a failed test.
Let’s start with Windows Mobile.
Windows Mobile
As you can rightfully guess, the built-in Internet Explorer Mobile (even as of WM6.1) is pretty bad:
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… which is the same as on WM6 Standard 6.0 (MS Smartphone):
…and is only a bit better as in the 5-year-old WM2003:
Finally, here’s the Pocket PC 2002 screenshot so that you can see the difference between it and WM2003:

Opera Mobile:
Version 9.33 beta (the one presented at WMC this February):
… and the good old 8.65 available for download/purchase:
As can clearly be seen, the 9.33, which renders the suite almost (but not entirely) flawlessly is indeed based on the new, 9.x-series kernel – a very good news indeed! (We’ll later see that it’s also Opera’s browser that delivers the best compatibility on the desktop too)
Let’s take a look at the current (R006; dating back to February) 3.5 Technical Preview of NetFront:
The new and, now, pretty much usable 1.0.8 WebKit-based Iris browser follows:
Note that, being non-public, I couldn’t test Wake3’s WebKit port.

Minimo:
I didn’t bother with other, even less compatible or officially outdated browsers.
As can be seen, Opera 9.xx is the best of the bunch. Hope it’ll be released soon!
BlackBerry
On BB, if anyone would, for some strange reason, use the native browser in it, he or she can except the following:
That is, not really good – stick with Opera Mini 4.1 instead, which, as opposed to Opera Mini 4.0, no longer crashes the BB.
Symbian S60v3 FP1
Symbian S60v3 FP1’s Nokia Web, also based on WebKit, isn’t flawless either:
As can be seen, despite what some people state about WebKit-based browsers, it’s not 100% compatible either.
Opera Mini 4.1
Finally, Opera Mini 4.1 beta, which runs equally good on all the above mobile platforms:
Desktop Windows browsers
As far as the desktop Windows is concerned, let’s take a look at my test results:

Firefox 3 beta5 (the latest):
The Internet Explorer 8 beta (also the latest) results are pretty bad – actually, it’s the same as with IE7:
(IE8)
(IE7)
Interestingly, Acid2 is far better rendered by IE8 than IE7 (screenshots HERE and HERE, respectively) – while it still fails the Acid3 test (which also makes the browser crash), albeit it still fares a bit better than IE7. That is, based on the Acid results, I expected far more – not even the forthcoming IE8 is as standard-compliant as Firefox, let alone Opera.
Finally, as you may have already guessed, Opera renders the test suite without any problems:
More information on all these (for example, my old Acid2 test results): my Web browsing-related articles, Web browser Bibles etc.

UPDATE (some two hours later):
A screenshot of WM5 AKU3 MS Smartphone Internet Explorer Mobile browser:
As can be seen, it's exactly the same as on the (later) WM6(.1).
Surur has published an iPod Safari (same as with iPhone) screenshot. As with all the other WebKit-based browsers, it isn’t the best:

UPDATE (04/23/2008): I’ve upgraded my BlackBerry 8800 to OS version 4.5.0.9. The upgrade is REALLY worth doing, even at the current beta stage. See THIS for more info. Should you miss his post, you’ll need to send a mail, with any body / message, to [email protected] get the download links for all current BB models. Note that the upgrade takes a LOT of time – don’t be afraid of it being so slow, it won’t brick your phone. Also, you'll need to re-register / configure (but not set up) everything again. The new OS, even in its currently beta stage, is WAY better than 4.2 or even 4.3 coming on some new Pearls. For example (just to name a few),
it supports A2DP / AVRCP flawlessly (working just great with the Plantronics Pulsar 590A, Voyager 855 and Gear4-BluPhones; including even automatic reconnection)
it no longer has the ugly condensed characters – the default new ones (BBAlpha Sans; as can be seen in HERE, there’re a lot of different character types, unlike under 4.2.1) are FAR easier on the eyes and can be made smaller than in OS version 4.2. A series of example Opera Mini 4.1 screenshots showing this.
This is how the medium-sized characters under 4.2.1 look like:
and the same under 4.5.0.9:
(Both with the minimal system character size set – 4.2.1 screenshot of this HERE.)
Note that, as OM uses its own small character set, there’s no difference between their rendering under the two different operating systems – they’re equally the same:
Returning to the question of Web standards compliance, while it has an otherwise better browser, has almost exactly the same support for Web techniques. This is why its results are just (see the uppermost square on the left) a tad better than with the 4.2.1.109 screenshot above:

REVIEW: a new iPhone-alike Web browser, Touch Browser

Web browsing is one of the major application areas of portable devices – no wonder the iPhone is also Web-centric with its excellent Safari browser.
The “accelerated” scrolling mode of Safari is widely copied in the Windows Mobile world. The latest title to support this kind of screen dragging mode is Touch Browser by Makayama available for purchase and, now, trial download HERE (manual HERE).
It’s an external wrapper to Internet Explorer Mobile (IEM), just like Webby and unlike traditional IEM plug-ins like Spb Pocket Plus, PIEPlus and MultiIE. This also means it has some of the inherent problems common to all these solutions; more on this later.
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OK, enough talk, let’s get straight to the facts: frankly, as of version 1.0.2, I’m not at all satisfied with this app. Currently, there are far better alternatives. Why? Let’s take a detailed look. (Note that this list is pretty much terse. If you don’t understand it, make sure you read my other Web browser reviews and Bibles; in them, I’ve thoroughly elaborated on all the issues I’ve referred to in this review.)
The keyboard is either vowels on top or numbers – there’s no QWERTY layout, unlike on the iPhone or with, say, Spb Full Screen Keyboard. This itself makes URL input very hard – iPhone’s QWERTY inputting is just far better and, if you’re (as most people) used to QWERTY, faster. Screenshots showing this: Landscape 1 2, Portrait 1 2. System-level auto-completion works in URL input mode (see THIS), but there’s no address completion (based on the history / the favorites) the like in Opera Mini 4.1 or all versions of Opera Mobile. Also note that it’s impossible to enter symbols like ~, ? and & - this is a MAJOR problem too! All you can do is assigning a hardware button to <Input Panel> and use it to quickly bring up the keyboard and enter anything on it, unrestricted.
It’s in no way possible to access the standard menu. Fortunately, it’s possible to access favorites via the context menu and the usual PIE / IEM context menu items, including for example Save Image for images (which doesn’t work?!), are all accessible. The lack of menu access results in, say, the inability to switch between low and hi-res modes on VGA Pocket PC’s on the fly. What is worse, it’s not possible to access the three (One Column / Fit to Screen / Desktop) different rendering modes in View, should you want to switch between them on-the-fly. Yeah, sure, ZB does have an entire button for one-column view, so, the problem is mitigated to some degree. Nevertheless, the default mode seems to be the desktop (!!!) view, which is, in most cases, completely useless and to-be-avoided. That is, you’ll end up having to switch to the one-column view, which, with some kinds of content (for example, charts) results in a huge decrease in readability (in general, the “Fit to screen” mode, which isn’t supported by Touch Browser, is the best of the three modes).
Speaking of the (W)VGA hi-res mode switch introduced in WM5 AKU 3.5, independent of its state, documents will ALWAYS be rendered in low-res. This is not what you may want to prefer if you have a hi-res device and want to take advantage of the resolution to fit as much data into the screen as possible.
The Settings menu has been hastily designed for Portrait devices and needs scrolling in Landscape – (this is, of course, a minor issue, compared to the major problems of the app)
No tabs or other enhancements; the only enhancement is the one-column mode, which doesn’t add much to WM2003SE+ devices (it was in WM2003SE that One Column mode was introduced). Compare this to the tab support of Spb Pocket Plus
No way to switch to text copy/paste mode – VERY bad!
No hotkey support at all – all you have is the D-pad (and, of course, the on-screen menu) for shortcuts
Dynamic scrolling is just far less spectacular and far slower than with Spb– mostly because of the slow CF-based engine
The D-pad can’t be used for scrolling and the Action button to select links – it’s strictly for bringing up / hiding the menu (up/down), navigating to the previous/next page (left/right) and showing the actual position of the viewport in the page (Action). The latter (displaying the actual position with scrollbar-alikes) doesn’t let for scrollbar-based scrolling and is far-far inferior to, say, Opera Mini 4’s or NetFront’s minimap / page overview solution. That is, there’s absolutely NO way of scrolling the page without using the touchscreen, only via the buttons. This is a REAL disadvantage compared to ALL other browsers or PIE plug-ins, where you can not only use the D-pad for scrolling, but you can also configure how scrolling should be done (link / line / page-based scrolling) or, in cases, can even use other hardware buttons for scrolling. Touch Browser doesn’t allow for the latter (that is, assigning scroll or page down functionality to hardware buttons as is explained in the Button Enhancer Bible.) It isn’t compliant with SmartSKey either, configured to page scrolling using the volume slider – unlike with most other Web browsers (or plug-ins).
Sometimes it just crashes – for example, when just entering http://www..com or the random URL given in the system input panel tip above. The latter can only be helped with the phone buttons. Also, upon exiting the app with the X icon, it always throws exceptions (like THIS and THIS). This certainly shows it needs some HEAVY, additional debugging.
Absolutely no feedback on the state of loading pages – unlike with the underlying IEM.
Verdict
While I pretty much liked Makayama’s past Windows Mobile-related software titles, all I can say is you’d better stay away from this title for the time being – that is, before it undergoes a real facelift and enhancement. It’s just worse than the alternatives. If you do need iPhone-like accelerated (!) scrolling, go for any of the newer browsers: Opera Mobile 9.x, NetFront 3.5 or, if you plan to stick with IEM, Spb Pocket Plus 4. If all you want to have is screen-based dragging (without the nice “acceleration”), then, other, even older browsers will do: NetFront 3.3/3.4, Opera Mobile 8.6x, Thunderhawk, Opera Mini (all versions) or the two traditional IEM plug-ins: PIEPlus and MultiIE. Technically, these browsers are ALL far superior – far more reliable, far more feature-packed, easier-to-use (buttons, fast scrolling, minimap etc.) and, with some of them (Opera Mini, for example) even free.
Also, this browser (as with Webby) certainly shows Compact Framework is just unsuitable for writing fast-scrolling apps. Use native C++ for implementing applications that rely on quick (!) graphics.
Knowing the Makayama folks are pretty adept and knowledgeable people, I really hope they do improve this browser and that, once, Touch Browser will become a decent alternative to screen-dragging solutions. For the time being, I don’t recommend it, however.
Acknowledgements
Thanks for the Makayama folks for providing me with a test version. This was about a day before the trial version has been released. Should I have known beforehand they were going to release a trial, I definitely wouldn’t have requested a test (read: registered) version, though – after all, I hate biting the feeding hand. Exactly this is why I’m asking ALL software developers to ALWAYS release trial versions of their titles. Then, I would have a far easier time writing bad reviews of titles I’ve received a test version (practically, a freebie) of.

What to come?
Now that I’m getting prepared for my W3C speech at Saturday, I plan to quickly update my YouTube playback & browsing-related stuff, particularly now that
1, CorePlayer 1.2.3 has just been released - with enhanced YouTube support;
2, a new and, according to the dev, somewhat faster compile of the YouTube TCPMP plug-in has been released
3, finally, firmware version v21 for the Nokia N95 has been released, adding Flash Lite 3 and, consequently, native YouTube support in Nokia Web. So far, I’ve found it excellent with its full features like stereo (!) audio playback, full screen mode etc – it’s certainly worth updating my Windows Mobile articles too to see how they compare to the native Flash Lite 3-based solution of Nokia.
Other reviews
JAMM’s review - definitely worth a read

Nice review, I think i'll stick with Opera Mobile...
On the youtube front I'd suggest this as an alternative. It uses TCPMP Codecs, but is so much faster and more efficient...

Thanks, Menneisyys ... for another excellent review. Personally, I use PIEPlus 2.2, and am pretty satisfied with what it has to offer, outside of the fact that the History Menu feature is extremely buggy.
I recently installed a test upgrade of SPB PocketPlus, from 3.x to 4.0.2, and find that it's implementation of IE features is not going to make me uninstall PIEPlus anytime soon ... Too bad, as I don't see any new development from ReenSoft at all, and fear they have abandoned their software efforts. PIEPlus 2.2 is really pretty good, but it is not perfect. I would have loved to see them DO something with it in the past two years.
Oh well ... the wait goes on (and on and on and on )
-pvs

.... or
http://www.skyfire.com/

UPDATE (04/23/2008): version 1.1 has just been released with the following fixes / enhancements:
- Qwerty keyboard option
- Button to turn TouchFlo on/off
- Improved animation algorithm (smoother)
- Sound on/off
- Saves custom home page
- Options page screen lag fixed
- (compared to pre-1.0.2 versions,) Added hyphen (-) on the keyboard
I keep you posted of the future versions. When most / all of my grieves are fixed, I post an entirely revised review.

Yet another review & comparison update: Web browser Teashark

As with UCWEB (see my new review HERE), it was more than one and a half year ago that I’ve reviewed the (then) current version of the Java-based Web browser, Teashark. In order to be as up to date as possible, I deemed it necessary to properly test the current version in order to see whether it’s any good and how it compares to the alternative browsers.
To make a long story short, I heavily recommend this browser if you have a non-touchscreen phone (for example, a Windows Mobile Standard smartphone or a Symbian phone) and, for some reason, you don’t want to use Opera Mini (or especially need the goodies Teashark has, while Opera doesn't: italic support and the sophisticated copy-from-webpages come into mind). Many of the shortcomings of the old version have been fixed; most importantly, the bad rendering engine. The new one is Webkit-based, which certainly shows: while one of the alternatives, UCWEB, completely fails at rendering most real-world Web pages retaining their original layout, Teashark very rarely fails to do the same. Two examples:
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(DPReview forums – correctly rendered)
(the W3C page: here, you always need to press left/right to align the differently indented original text. This works in exactly the same way as in Opera Mini.)
If you have a touchscreen-based phone or PDA, on the other hand, you most probably will want to ignore this title: it makes absolutely no use of the touchscreen. As, otherwise, the browser is very nice, I really hope this issue is fixed before long so that Windows Mobile or Symbian S60 5th ed users will be able to use their touchscreens.
Unfortunately, as with UCWEB, it doesn’t have a BlackBerry-compliant version. (The JAR file can be installed and runs, but it can’t be used as it still presents a three-softkey-based menu, which is pretty much far away from the one menubutton-based approach of BlackBerry. This also means none of the menu items can be accessed – all you see when you press the hardware menu button on the BB is “Close”.)
Teashark has several goodies the other browsers really should implement:
- Excellent and very easy copy/paste support – much cleaner than that of UCWEB
- Support for italic characters (it also supports bold but not underline)
- It even supports “previous” in “find in page”
- Pretty well thought-out thumbnail-based quick switching between in-memory (and recently visited) pages
Compared to Opera Mini, it has some major problems, though:
- No touchscreen support at all – a MAJOR drawback!
- Much fewer Web pages can be kept in-memory
- Somewhat worse Web standards compliance (still much better than that of UCWEB, though.) Note that you will encounter for example dropdown list selection problems (with, for example, THIS demopage - give it a try if you have an old Jeodek [on Windows Mobile]! You’ll see you won’t be able to select any item) with old Esmertec Jeodek versions (for example, the one coming with the HTC Vox / s710 smartphone). You WILL want to upgrade to a newer Jbed version; for example, I haven’t encountered similar problems with the latest Jbed version, 20090217.5.1R2 available for download HERE (direct link to download) – or, if you want a version with multiple midlet execution support, 20081203.2.1 linked from the same post (direct link to download).
Comparison chart
You'll want to very thoroughly scrutinize the chart - as with most my articles, a lot more information is contained in it than in the article. It's HERE. Note that the chart has info on all the other Java-based browsers too – and a lot of never-before published tips and tricks on, for example, getting a signed version of Opera Mini.

Made the thread temporarily sticky, mostly because of the useful contents of the chart really worth checking out.

Something worth considering when it comes to Teashark (and, to somewhat lesser degree, UCWEB) as opposed to BOLT and, most importantly, Opera Mini (the two latter browsers have a well-known company behind them with [as long as BOLT is considered, I refer to its predecessor, Thunderhawk] long years of working without any reports on their “listening to” the HTTP traffic). After all, don’t forget that all these four browsers (except for UCWEB’s non-Java versions) use a central server doing the reformatting & compression work for the requested pages and, therefore, eavesdropping, at least in theory, might be possible. Let me cross-post GldRush98’s post (original at http://forum.xda-developers.com/showpost.php?p=1522658&postcount=5 ).
Cross-posting this from a post I made on the Opera Mini forums, since this community is more likely to understand my issues with this browser...
There is something fishy with Teashark.
THINK ABOUT IT.
1) They appeared out of no where with a Java app.
2) There is NO linkable parent company on their site. Can't look up domain registration, can't find out ANY other information AT ALL about them and who they are.
3) They have absolutely NO way to relate back to the community. They have a "blog" run on a wordpress backend. That right there should throw up some red flags. Why would a "company" or WHATEVER they are that is developing a Java browser (with no ads in it mind you), use Wordpress as a blog backend? That just makes no sense to me
4) How exactly does this company make their money? Something tells me you don't want to know if you've been using their browser. They have no advertisements on their site or in the browser. They have to be making money somewhere, because they wouldn't have these proxy servers serving up loads of bandwidth for free. Where is their money coming from? A parent company? Who?
5) Their whole website is fishy. Aside from complete lack of information, why do all links on their site link you to port 8080 on their server? Why aren't they running over standard port 80? Something is odd about that alone.
6) The vendor tag in the app is labeled as "Vendor". Ummmm... what?
Their website traces back to: "IP 69.72.142.98 is from United States(US) in region North America"
That is about the only traceable information I can figure out.
It creeps me out that this mysterious company pops up out of no where and throws this "browser" app out there, with absolutely no effort to disseminate who they are. What is even creepier is that people have downloaded this app and are using it with ZERO knowledge of who this company is or who is behind them!