Current Pocket PC Web browser solutions compared

[Alexander Turcic]

Although mobile Web browing is still in its infancy and usually causing more headache than satisfaction, we are thankful to Menneisyys for his mammoth task of comparing the pros and cons of current Web browser solutions for the Pocket PC platform.

Unfortunately, all the current Pocket PC browsing solutions have severe flaws. They are all far dumber than any decent desktop browsers (Internet Explorer, Netscape, Safari etc) and have sometimes totally diffuse capabilities (for example, one may be great at running Java applets, another is the only browser capable of in-page text search, the third excels at running your favourite JavaScript-based game etc). It's highly possible you end up using three or four different browsers because of this. Enough already with the talk! Let's get to the browsers.

Agreed. Let's jump straight to the article.

[Antoine of MMM]

I am glad its a thread at PPC thuoghts. Any PalmOS browser convo instantly goes moot as one cannot get a great browsing experience except on the barest of mobile formatted pages.

I really wish that it was easy to change teh @screen mode of the optimized and wide-screen modes within Blazer 4; that would do a great deal in helping Blazer (and any other palmOS browser for that matter) deal with many websites.

[Traecer Prime]

Originally Posted by Antoine of MMM

I am glad its a thread at PPC thuoghts. Any PalmOS browser convo instantly goes moot as one cannot get a great browsing experience except on the barest of mobile formatted pages.

I really wish that it was easy to change teh @screen mode of the optimized and wide-screen modes within Blazer 4; that would do a great deal in helping Blazer (and any other palmOS browser for that matter) deal with many websites.

While mobile sites definitely work best, I have pretty good surfing experiences with my Tungsten T3 and WebPro 3.1. I really, really wish it had better CSS support (especially for the handheld media type). I would love a port of Minimo to Palm OS, but I'm not holding my breath...

[MrSaint]

I would love a port of Minimo to Palm OS, but I'm not holding my breath...

Alas, the current team behind the Minimo project was pretty clear about it that they wouldn't support the current Palm OS platform ;(

[Chaos]

I'd like to see more mobile browsers support the mobile media type... And to see them handle the CSS display: none; in a different way.

As it stands, you can't rely on them supporting the mobile media type, and even if you hide things, like the aforementioned images, it'll still grab them, just won't display. Which means sure, the page will render pretty quickly, but it'll continue 'loading' in the background. I think it'd be better if they just didn't load things that were display:none... I don't *think* that's the 'standard' way to handle display:none, but it would probably work better.

Of course that's basically every mobile browser... Not limited to just PPC. The only mobile platform I haven't seen the problem in is the X11 ROMs on the Zauri, where some people have run full Firefox installs. Opera (on the Zaurus again) seems to be not-too-bad in this respect too, though. At least it has a *very* robust page re-forming system that can re-flow pages to fit a handheld screen quite well.

[johninspace]

Browsing on your mobile is much better via RSS

Check out http://www.litefeeds.com (images, full text, RSS)

They have a free PocketPC client