Today I am going to review web browsers for Windows Mobile (formerly known as Pocket PC, formerly known as Windows CE).

Minimo
Mozilla’s attempt at a mobile web browser is in version 0.016, so I think it is more of a proof of concept than an actual, usable web browser.  The website claims that “Minimo has been focused on code-size and runtime footprint reduction, small screen usablity, and porting to small consumer devices.”  Well I think it fails, fails, and fails, respectively.  The install file is larger than the Opera install file (8MB vs. 6MB).  It takes a good 30-45 seconds to launch.  The browser takes forever to load pages.  Scalability to my 240-pixel-wide screen is handled poorly: fonts are left much too large, and God forbid there be an image on the page.  And worst of all, it will invariably crash after viewing about four or five pages.  I stopped using it after the second time it crashed and took down not just Minimo, but my whole OS (with no Control-Alt-Delete, I was forced to let the battery die in order to use it again).  On the plus side, it is the only browser that works with Google Maps (although it uses some kind of proxy site—it’s not actually connecting to Google Maps).

I give Minimo a rating of 0.016 out of 10.  Maybe in a few years it will be a usable piece of software.

Opera Mobile
Opera is the web browser known for running on lots of different devices (Wii and NDS included), so it’s no surprise that they have put together a nice little browser for Windows Mobile.  It is much faster than Minimo, although I can’t say that it’s faster than Internet Explorer (unlike its full-size cousin).  I have mixed feelings about this browser.  There is a weird thing where zooming to 100% causes the browser to go into a completely different rendering mode.  On the text-only version of my site, for example, putting the size to 90% shouldn’t change much, but it actually causes the margins and borders to be rendered completely differently.  It seems the default (100%) zoom level is going through some special optimization, while 90% just resizes the text and renders everything else as-is.  This makes 90% zoom-level better for sites that are designed with a mobile device in mind, and 100% is better for the rest of the web.

Other than that, I have a strong suspicion that images are cached in their full-sized form, rather than caching the resized version (which would generally have made the program faster).  In general Opera seems to do a slightly better job than Internet Explorer on most pages, but it is slower and has some rendering issues.  The real question is this:  will I pay $24 for it after the 30-day trial period is over?  Probably not at first, but if I miss it strongly enough after a while I might.

Pocket IE
Internet Explorer for Windows Mobile is actually pretty good at what it does.  It has some rendering problems, just like any Internet Explorer, but I’ll take those over the stability problems of Minimo any day.  The best thing about Pocket IE is that it is much faster than the other options.  I guess working in the same building as the people who designed the OS will help you stay a little bit ahead of the game.  However, the browser does have some real problems dealing with long pages (Wikipedia is almost unusable on Pocket IE).  In the past I have avoid this by using Google’s mobile proxy, which basically strips sites down to just text.  Overall though I haven’t had too many problems.

So to conclude all this, the ideal would be to have both Opera and IE available, as they have different strengths.  But I’m not sure if Opera is enough better than IE to justify spending any money on it.  And if you value your life at all, stay away from Minimo, at least until the most significant digit of the version comes before the decimal.

Disclaimer: these tests were all conducted on a Dell Axim, running Windows Mobile 2003.