Everything you need to know about the scrolling behavior of the two new Internet Explorer plug-ins MultiIE 4 and PIEPlus 2.x

I do most of my Web browsing on my Pocket PC while not at work. It’s just great to be able to browse the Web on my HTC Wizard while, for example, doing the usual 2-hour-long daily walks with my wife in the nearby mountains. (Yeah, being married to someone that has been the third and fourth in entire Finland’s orienteering championship in her age group has some implications, now-you-have-to-come-with-me-to-walk-wise ;) ) Then, one-handed operation of Web browsers and mailer apps is of extreme importance. This is why I'm always searching the most optimal Web browser solutions that allow for this.

One-hand operation makes it necessary to use either the hardware D-pad or the jog dial to operate (of course, they also support other hardware buttons, but they, in general, are harder / less intuitive to operate than the D-pad or the jog dial). Note that your PDA doesn’t necessarily need a real jog dial for the latter to work – there are very nice hacks (most importantly, SmartSKey) that let volume sliders to be used as jog dials for even easier scrolling.

Fortunately, advanced Internet Explorer plug-ins like the latest MultiIE and PIEPlus incarnations greatly support one-handed operations. (Please read this and this for a review of the latest versions of both plug-ins, respectively.) However, there are problems with both plug-ins, particularly when it comes to WM5 and its entirely different default scrolling behavior (see this for more info on, including modifying it). Unfortunately, while these applications support pre-WM5 operating systems just great, hardware D-pad and/or jog dial-based page scrolling-wise, their WM5 support is not the best.

(Please note that, in here, I won’t explain what page-, line- and link-based scrolling is. Read my earlier Web browser roundups – for example, the Bible of Pocket PC Web browsers – for more information.)

In this write-up, I’ve thoroughly tested and summarized the last two (MultiIE D71 and D72 and PIEPlus 2.0 and 2.1 beta 2) versions of both plug-ins. Their scrolling behaviour is radically different.

In the next two charts, I summarize every possible scenario and both the two latest and, hardware button/jog dial-based scrolling-wise different versions of the two plug-ins so that you will definitely find your case too.

The first chart discusses the D-pad and the second the jog dial (which, again, may be a volume slider too if you use the excellent SmartSKey described here) for both the pre-WM5 and WM5 operating systems. With the D-pad case, there’re two additional cases under WM5: if you use the Internet Explorer scroll-overwrite registry hack explained here and if you don’t. As can be seen, PIEPlus 2.x always re-sets its value to the default “scroll by link” value.

D-pad chart:

D-padMultiIE 4 D71MultiIE 4 D72PIEPlus 2.0PIEPlus 2.1b2
Pre-WM5Working as shouldWorking as shouldWorking as shouldWorking as should
WM5 without the reghackLine / link scroll OK; page scroll often double-scrollsOnly link scroll is available, no matter what is setDoesn’t work; no page scroll support at all. “Page” scrolling always takes place in about 30-40% page amounts – just a bit more than with line scrolling. Also, backward scrolling is link scrolling.Working as should
WM5 with the reghackPage scroll only, no matter what is setPage scroll only, no matter what is set(Doesn’t let use it (not that it’d be needed))(Doesn’t let use it (not that it’d be needed))

As can clearly be seen, the latest, D72 build of MultiIE 4 isn’t able to scroll by pages any more, which is most probably caused by the fact that it often scrolled two pages in D71 and the author has entirely removed this feature until he finds a solution to the double page-scroll problem. Also, it should be pointed out that, if you’re a PIEPlus user and want to have page hardware-based scrolling under WM5, you will want to upgrade to the latest, 2.1b2 version – the old 2.0 has absolutely no page scrolling under WM5.

Jog dial (volume slider) chart:

Jog dial (volume slider)MultiIE 4 D71MultiIE 4 D72PIEPlus 2.0PIEPlus 2.1b2
WM2003SE PL720Same setting as with D-pad scrollSame setting as with D-pad scrollOnly page scroll, no matter what is setDoesn’t work at all
HTC Wizard + SmartSKeyOnly page scroll, no matter what is set; no double page scrolling problemsOnly page scroll, no matter what is setOnly page scroll, no matter what is setOnly page scroll, no matter what is set

As can be seen, if you’re a pre-WM5 operating system user and would use your jog dial on your device, it’s highly possible version 2.1b2 won’t support it any more – that is, you may want to stick to 2.0 until this bug is fixed.

Also note that if you choose to use the latest, D72 build of MultiIE 4 on your WM5 device and you have a jog dial (volume slider), you can use the D-pad for link-based scrolling and the jog dial (volume slider) for page-based scrolling. That is, the “only-link-scrolling-is-possible” problem introduced in D72 can be alleviated this way, if you only use the jog dial to scroll one page at a time and only use the D-pad to scroll by link.

A quick note: PIEPlus 2.1b2 has sometimes page scrolling problems on QVGA devices in full screen mode

In this screenshot, only the uppermost few pixel rows of the lowermost row is readable. After having pressed the Down button, there is no scrollback as can be seen in here. Explicitly enabling the scroll bar (Options Plus/ Screen / uncheck the two “Hide * scrollbar” checkboxes) or disabling the by default enabled Pocket View mode (which is pretty useless on WM2003SE+ devices because of the built-in One Column view mode, except for the slightly different approach to rendering HTML tables as has been explained in my PIEPlus 2.0 review) doesn’t help in this respect either. (This doesn’t apply to VGA devices – in full screen, page scrolling is just OK on them.)

While PIEPlus 2.0 doesn’t support page scrolling on WM5 devices, if your WM5 PDA has a jog dial (or, you have a HTC Wizard and use SmartSKey), you won’t encounter the same problems.

Note that it’s not always that these problems are visible – sometimes they do come up and sometimes they don’t.