Should be nice to have Firefox allways availible :D

"As I understand it, the browser that comes with many of these phones is IE 3."

The latest version of Pocket Internet Explorer (the one that comes with Windows Mobile 2003) is apparently 4.01. According to http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/default.asp?url=/library/en-us/wcepie/html/cerefPocketInternetExplorer.asp, it's equivalent to the desktop version of Microsoft Internet Explorer 3.2. The nice table says it has some support for JScript and XML. It says it doesn't support CSS but the comparison table at http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/default.asp?url=/library/en-us/wcedsn40/html/cgconsummaryofbrowserfeatures.asp says it does have some CSS support.

When I was gainfully employed, I used to have semi-regular access to an XDA II. From what I remember, the version of IE was basically usable but had poor support for any sort of advanced Web page (I seem to recall this version didn't even support iframes).

Well, it's not a phone browser for the 21st century with a horizontal scrollbar :D

This was the best news I've had in months. For my sins I'm the lead engineer for our enterprise Windows Mobile\Smartphone software build. I've spent the last few hours messing with this and I cannot stress how cool it is to have the guts of a real browser for my platform(s). Pocket IE may report itself as IE x.whatever and while the most recent incarnation in WM2003SE is a significant improvement on the older versions it provides nothing more than a miserable browsing experience IMHO. Support for features is patchy and the devil is in the detail and usually it's invariably not good news.

I've got a bit more work to do to get my own full build environment properly set up but I've taken the raw binary tree Doug provided, built an installer cab and have been pushing it onto the one device I brought home this evening (a Tosh e800 running WM2003SE with a VGA screen). I've got loads more devices at work to throw this at (Dell Axim X5, X3, X3i, X30, X50, iPaq 5450, 5550, 4700, 3715, XDA II, XDA III, FS Pocket Loox something or other, and some smartphones that I can't remember the full names of). The install requires ~10Mb, Program memory in use jumps by ~7Mb on opening the Google, rising to around 10.5Mb for Mozilla.org. So at a minimum you will need 20-25Mb available, possibly more.

Don't have any feedback on performance\issues yet, but it installs and it does render the Google home page and a few others (Slashdot, o2.ie, Mozilla.org). It's got lots of rough edges but it's great to see.

The display is a bit quirky - it's a free floating window (quite novel to see in an app running on a Windows Mobile device), and the WM Start menu is repositioned to the bottom of the screen (possibly a Smartphone build option?). Got to dig now to find out how to do stuff - no menus exposed beyond the addressbar, back, forward, reload, stop and go.

Interestingly it seems to ignore the Windows Mobile "Connection Planner" (the My ISP\Work\My Work connection thing), which might be a blessing but it's way too early to say.

JoeM

Darned shame that Minimo doesn't have a build for Palm devices.

I'll second that! My Tungsten W connects up wonderfully and it would be /great/ to have a worthy browser on there. I'm sure users of Palms everywhere would agree! Just don't flake out and only offer an PalmOS 5 version only -- we T|W owners didn't ask for the version we got! ;)

Looks great nonetheless. Here's to the Minimo team!

~ Kevin

Palm 5 support seems possible, considering it works on ARM processors.

But Palm OS 4 support is almost definately out because of it's lack of ARM support.

Long, Long way to go, but this looks to be very promising. Here's some random recommendations:

* Use a "Stop and Reload" combined button like the same-named Firefox extension.
* Have status bar hide when not changing
* Have option for text-only render mode for websites which are totally inadequately designed (such as bad IE only sites with fixed table sizes and crazy non-scaling design)
* Themes :P