Friday 6 July, 2007

Mobile Browsers

Pocket Internet Explorer
The default browser on Windows CE (used on the Pocket PC).
NetFront
One of the most popular mobile browsers.
Minimo (Mini Mozilla - using the same engine as Mozilla and Firefox)
In development.
Series 60 Browser
The new browser used by Nokia on the third edition of its Series 60 handsets. Important; see the note below.
Konqueror Embedded
Still in development - for now it seems to be a project designed only to get Konqueror packaged in such a way that it can run on a device.
OpenWave
A browser for mobile phones, installed by default on some of them - tested on an emulator set up with the same memory as the Pocket PC.
Opera
One of the most popular mobile browsers, and is the default browser on a large number of mobile devices.
Opera Mini
Fairly new, but rapidly becoming one of the most popular mobile browsers, due to the fact that it can run on devices with extremely low resources. It still uses Opera, but it is rendered on a server, formatted using Small Screen Rendering and the rendered page passed to the phone.

Webby Mobile
The Webby Mobile Browser is the famous freeware version of Webby Pro.

AvantGo
AvantGo for BlackBerry software caches content locally, providing enhanced navigation, faster browsing and the ability to access content even if disconnected, say on the subway or on a plane

Sony Ericsson's SEMC-Browser
Sony Ericsson's native web browser was an interesting experiement. SE tried to make their own instead of licensing one and the result was pretty bad, until recently. The new versions of their browser, 4.03 and 4.2 are not that bad, although the browser seems "stuck" permanently in a badly-implemented Small Screen Rendering mode (the browser would insist on placing text and icons below others, even if there is enough screen space to render them side by side).

Teleca's Obigo
Obigo is Openwave's real competitor. It is also meant mostly for low-end phones and it can also start up with less than 600 KBs of memory. It also supports HTML 4.01, CSS 2.1, Javascript 1.5, DOM2, SVG Tiny, XHTML, WML and it incorporates a "thumbnail view" (similar to Nokia's "minimap" trick).


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