Internet Explorer 6 running on Windows Mobile - Do I have to wait for WM7?
Microsoft has canceled the Deepfish research project lab. I was not sure if I would love the Deepfish browser as there was a big lack of missing features like AJAX, JavaScript, Flash/Silverlight. Yesterday I read in the news that Microsoft will port their Internet Explorer 6 render engine to Windows Mobile. Hey, does this mean that Internet Explorer 6 will get a rebirth?
The good thing is definitely that Windows Mobile gets a better Web browser from factory. Today we have Safari running on the iPhone, Opera mini as a Java application, the Nokia browser etc. which offer more HTML and JavaScript support than the very old-styled PIE.
The biggest benefit will be that it is the full IE6 render engine, meaning that any page that renders properly in IE6 on the PC should do just fine on Windows Mobile.
Well, I will believe this when I first view any Web page on a 240x320 small screen but yes, if the page gets zoomed and we get a lens feature like in Deepfish (or Opera mini) it should be fine. The only bad thing is that it is the IE6 render engine which is already very old. Why is it not possible to use the IE8 render engine to support more CSS properties and forget the IE6? Most Web developers will complain this as IE6 usage is going down more and more.
Microsoft, do you plan to offer an update for Windows Mobile 6 (i.e. as AKU3) or will it only be available in next version WM7?
4 Comments
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Arron said
Are you kidding me? Why the heck would we want IE6?? It's rendering, css and javascript process are horrible. Why can't MS just open an open source browser based on webkit/ghecko
Michael Schwarz said
I don't want to have IE6, but I would like to have a better Web browser on Windows Mobile, and IE6 is definitely a better browser than PIE today. Open source, in my eyes, is not the answer - we saw this with the first beta of Chrome. What I would like to see is the use of the IE8 render engine.
Ian Blackburn said
It's hard to understand the logic behind this decision. The only thing I can think of is they wanted to improved the browsing experience on Windows Mobile before WM7 and this was the cheapest/easiet root. But IE6 is a still bazaar choice - most devs would like to forget this browser for reasons already menthioned in these comments.
tfgbd said
MS picked the IE 6 engine because it has been availble for OEMs to use in custom Windows CE based devices since late 2003 when it first shipped with Windows CE 4.20. In fact, Pocket PC/Windows Mobile's now defunct sister platform, Handheld PC once shipped with IE CE 4.01. Ports of the desktop IE engine have been available to Windows CE for years. There is even a version of IE 4 for the Dreamcast. Now, why it has taken MS almost 9 years to finally ship one with a version of Pocket PC is anyone's guess. Hopefully they at least added some sort of zooming feature and it isn't just a quick Windows Mobileized wrapper for the standard IE CE web browser control. I guess it's also possible they mixed more IE 6 and PIE code to create yet another IE lovechild like previous PIE versions. Would it really shock anyone if it were revealed that Pocket PC/"IE Mobile" was no longer an original scratch built browser it startd as and more and more desktop IE code has leaked into it in each new release of it? This seems especially true for the PIE in WM6.