First v3.4 Technical Preview of great Web browser NetFront out!

NetFront (NF for short), the alternative Web browser for the Pocket PC, is constantly evolving. It was in last summer that the last, 3.3 version has been released and, now, the first Technical Preview (TP for short) of the forthcoming, 3.4 version is out, with a lot of advertised new features; for example, AJAX support. No wonder I was more than eager to (thoroughly – after all, I’m also a HTTP / programming / AJAX megahacker / pro!) test it. Let’s take a look at how it compares to the previous version!

(Note that this is NOT a beginner's introduction to what NetFront is. Play some hours with it to discover it OR make sure you read my previous Web browsing-related articles to get a picture how previous versions compared to other Web browsers on the Pocket PC and what niceties and secrets it has.)

Availability

The download page is here; the product homepage here. Note that the list of restrictions has a mistake: “User Agent cannot be edited” is, fortunately, not true.

Also keep in mind that this version can only be used in January; this, fortunately, also means there will be a new TP version before the end of this month.

Two important notes: coexistence with NF 3.3 and WM5 only!

As with the 3.3 Technical Previews some 1-1.5 years ago, the new, 3.4 TP’s can safely co-exist with 3.3. That is, if you already have 3.3 on your device, you can still safely install the 3.4 TP version(s) on the same Pocket PC. They are completely independent of each other.

Furthermore, the current version is WM5 only. Sorry.

“Hacking”

1. Unfortunately, it’s not possible to hack the commercial 3.3 Java / Flash / SVG plug-ins into the 3.4 TP version. That is, for example, it’s not worth trying to create a registry import file to create the above-listed registry values in the registry.
2. The same stands for the User-Agents defined under HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\ ACCESS\NetFront34\UADataX – even if you import the UAData2… UAData7 subkeys, they won’t work.
3. There aren’t files to hack (by, for example, copying binary config files from 3.3) either

All in all, it’s not possible to hack the TP version to have the same functionality as the commercial one – don’t even try it.

Changes from version 3.3

1. In Menu / Tools / Browser Settings, the Misc tab has an additional “Enable Visual Bookmark” checkbox to en/disable the new Visual Bookmarks functionality (old 3.3 screenshot here). When it’s enabled (it is by default), this mode instead of the “boring” traditional bookmarks, a graphical representation is used. Unfortunately, this TP version doesn’t seem to save the thumbnails as yet, which makes this feature, for the time being, useless. That is, make sure you disable the by default enabled checkbox in the current version.
2. The Browser Settings dialog itself has also changed: now, it’s the right menu that has the tab names and tabs aren’t used any more. This way, it’s easier to access invisible tabs. (3.4 screenshot, 3.3 screenshot)
3. There is no “Security” tab any more; its contents have been transferred to a brand new “Security Settings” menu in the Tools menu. I don’t think it was a good move: after all, it’s very rarely used and, therefore, it’s better not to crowd often-used menus with submenus like this.
4. As far as the default settings are concerned, they’re the same; for example, in View / Advanced Settings, the default Courier is still not changed to a proportional font (you’ll want to do this first thing after the install; unfortunately, it’ll also result in another reboot). Similarly, General / Advancerd Settings / Software Keyboard / Auto pop-up is disabled by default. You will need to enable it if you want to enter anything in the Address Bar in full screen mode using any on-screen (not hardware keyboard based) input method. The only difference is that the contents of the “Range to hold decoded images” in View / Advanced Settings is changed from All to Viewport Only (with Margin).
5. In the protocol level, the “Mozilla/4.08 (PDA; NF33PPC3AR/1.0) NetFront/3.3" User-Agent HTTP request header value has been changed to "Mozilla/5.0 (PDA; NF34PPC/1.0) like Gecko NetFront/3.4" (see THIS for more info on all this.)
6. As far as the Registry is concerned, there are, naturally, no "ACCESS cvmplugin", "SVG" and "Shockwave Flash" values under HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\ ACCESS\NetFront34\ Plugins
7. In HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\ ACCESS\NetFront34\UAData*, the values of "Platform" ("Pocket PC" -> "Windows Mobile"), "AppVersion" ("3.3" -> "5.0 (Windows; en)") and "AppName" (“ACCESS NetFront" -> "Netscape") have all been been changed. They have, however, absolutely no effect on the HTTP headers passed. That is, just disregard the people that tell you to set any of the text input fields except for the User-Agent text input area.
8. Under HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\ ACCESS\NetFront34\BrowserPref, there are some new values related to the new Visual Bookmark feature (state; saving thumbnails): "VisualBookmarkSaveThumbnail" and "VisualBookmark". Also, there is two new values, "BrowserProfile" and "ScrollType"; "DOMDocumentAll", which was related to the in-memory HTML parsed representation, is gone.
9. In some cases, it’s more intelligent at rendering multi-column stuff in the Normal mode, with all settings being the same. For example, my Game-Over test page looks this in 3.4 and this in 3.3. The 3.4 rendition is indeed much better. (Incidentally, 3.3 TP versions (for example, 1.04) had problems with this page too – that is, they haven’t rendered the contents in Full rendering at all as can be seen in this screenshot. This is no longer a problem in the final version of 3.3.)
10. As opposed to 3.3, it has no longer problems with IHT. For example, my test IHT page is rendered correctly, as opposed to the 3.3 way of rendering (that is, not displaying the main article at all)
11. Fortunately, there's no change in the SmartSKey support either: it's working just great for full page scrolling, independent of what scrolling method is set in Misc / Cursor Key. That is, you can set the D-pad to link scroll mode (if you, for example, prefer one-handed navigation) and use the volume slider to scroll pages. Then, you get the best of both worlds. (Now, I wish Opera Mobile supported SmartSKey + volume slider-based scrolling!)
12. It, however, has some problems. For example, the Google ad is completely misplaced in 3.4 while it’s rendered OK in 3.3. Both, again, using exactly the same (Normal display mode) rendering settings. (This is a problem with ALL Game Over pages!) Switching to the Smart display mode (which isn't so important with 3.4 as was with 3.3) fixes this problem.

Page Pilot

In addition to the, in my opinion, pretty useless visual bookmarks, the new version sports another brand new feature, Page Pilot, which is pretty similar (but, unfortunately, still inferior) to the well-known page navigation / zoom-out feature of Nokia's excellent Symbian S60 Series 3 Web browser.

If you long-press the "Down" arrow on your D-pad, then, the view will quickly zoom out entirely to show the entire Web page, with the need for vertical scrolling only on very long pages (like my benchmarking page). An example of such a zoomed-out state are as follows: QVGA and VGA screenshot. There, you can freely move the red selection frame with either the D-pad or with the stylus; after doing this, it'll promptly zoom back to the previous (normal) zoom level.

In most cases, this feature uses a far too zoomed out state, which renders the feature, in general, pretty useless (at least on low-resolution QVGA devices; hope the Access folks come up with a configurable zoom-out percentage), but, at least, it's nice to see the NetFront engineers try to implement one of the killer features of the new Nokia browser.

CSS and AJAX compliance

(See THIS for more info / background on these tests!)

As far as CSS is concerned, as can be seen in this result screenshot, the CSS compliance has only slightly been improved over the previous version. Opera Mobile and Minimo (two excellent alternative Pocket PC browsers) are still way better in this respect.

As far as AJAX is concerned (the new browser is also advertised to have a brand new Ajax engine), the AJAX support has really been improved. NF 3.4 has passed my Test1, Test2, Simple Ajax Address Book - 1 and 2 tests (click for screenshots as usual). It's only the ImageLabeler test that didn't run (it just presents an empty screen). This is very good news! Now, while Minimo and Opera Mobile are still better at this compartment, NetFront is getting closer.

Benchmarks

In these tests, I’ve used my well-known benchmark page (please do read my past articles on how it should be used). I’ve benchmarked both page loading times and memory consumption of the loaded page (NOT NetFront itself!).

As far as page loading times are concerned, they are considerably (about 35%) lower than with version 3.3 and are slightly above the HALF of AKU2+ PIE times (and, therefore, even better than pre-AKU2 PIE's). Impressive!

As far as dynamic memory (RAM) usage is concerned, I’ve benchmarked really unbelievable results with the new version – it even beats Opera Mobile, the, up to now, most memory-friendly full-blown Pocket PC Web browser (note that Opera Mini and Thunderhawk both have even better memory usage but they’re using a simplified page structure) out of water!

Model I’ve tested it on; page loading speed in seconds / memory usage in MegabytesUniversalDell Axim x51v A12 (AKU2.3)HTC Wizard (AKU 3.2) running at 240 MHz
Netfront 3.4 TP 0Two times 15s / 1.39M12, 13 and 14s / two times 0.8M15s / 0.9M
Netfront 3.3 commercialn/t16 and 19s / 3.7Mn/t
PIE (Default mode; One column mode is considerably – about 27% – faster!)29 and 33s / 6.9M28 and 29s / 7.5M24s / 8M
Opera Mobile 8.6 (Fit to screen, default 11 font size)n/t33s / 2.9Mn/t

All in all, the engine has REALLY been improved, speed and dynamic memory usage-wise! Thumbs up to Access – this is what I call REALLY cool!

That is, Pros

1. Vastly improved memory usage and considerably decreased page loading times!
2. Quick reload when you press Back, like in AKU2+ PIE or Opera Mobile (a GREAT feature in a Pocket PC Web browser with an expensive and/or slow connection!)
3. The general Web compliance has been greatly enhanced (see for example IHT)
4. AJAX support is getting pretty good (not so good as with Minimo / Opera Mobile though)
5. The new Visual Bookmarks are pretty cool-looking, albeit a bit slow in use and, therefore, seems to offer limited usability
6. The same stands for the new Page Pilot functionality.

Cons

1. Currently, WM5 only – don’t even try to install it on your pre-WM5 device because it won’t work
2. You may run into some overlapping problems even in unrestricted Normal display mode, necessitating the change to Smart-Fit Rendering (which roughly – but not always, see the Game-Over screenshot! – corresponds to “One column” in the PIE parlance, particularly when the "Simple Browsing" browsing mode is (also) active)
3. No real plug-ins and the restrictions are pretty severe. The plug-ins / the number of parallel tabs can’t be hacked and, therefore, the browser can’t be “hacked” to become a fully-fledged one, not even for paying customers of 3.3 and it’ll take long-long months if not even a year (as was roughly the case with 3.3) for Access to release the final, commercial, unrestricted version. Note that the lack of the Macromedia / Adobe Flash plug-in also mean I couldn’t test whether the Flash plug-in bug of 3.2 / 3.3 I’ve discovered has been fixed or not
4. When you change for example the zoom factor, the text size, the browsing and the display mode (all in the View menu), the visual change is considerably slower than with PIE or Opera Mobile because NF still checks whether there is a new version of all the used resources (and reloads them if they've been changed). This behaviour, in addition to the (in most cases, little) network bandwidth usage, also makes any of these changes considerably slower. Unfortunately, the cache setting (Netwrork first (only on startup) / Cache first) don't have any effect on this.
5. Still no hardware button support, including the inability to redefine the WM5 softkeys. A quick note: fortunately, they're better-behaving than those of PIE in full screen mode: when you press a softkey, the submenu will be promptly displayed. With PIE, you need two softkey presses to achieve the same.
6. Still impossible to hide the scrollbars / tabs in full screen mode
7. Still pretty bad CSS compliance (albeit a bit better than in 3.3)
8. Unfortunately, the download dialog is still modal (under WM5), which means you can’t do anything while downloading – this can be a major pain in the back if you, for example, download over a slow (say, GPRS) connection. This is a definite minus compared to almost all the other Pocket PC Web browsers, which do allow for continued Web browsing / navigation while downloading in the background. (VGA screenshot; QVGA screenshot in full screen mode and not in full screen mode) Please see this roundup for more information on all this.
9. Still has problems with Unicode (for example, with Word punctuation) when using the (default) Western alphabet as can be seen in here; this problem can only be eliminated by after switching to for example Central-European. (Also see this thread on this problem)

Verdict

I certainly welcome the vastly enhanced engine in many respects (except for, unfortunately, the still pretty bad CSS compatibility). Way to go Access!

Give this browser a try particularly if memory usage is a concern (because, for example, you’re accessing VERY big Web pages on a low-end Pocket PC like the 32M RAM (12M usable at most) HP iPAQ rx1950) and the lack of Flash / Java support isn’t a problem.

UPDATE (01/20/2007): AximSite frontpage. It might be worth checking out because there are some additional success / problem reports in there.

Other (also reader) feedback available at http://www.aximsite.com/boards/showthread.php?t=146178 , http://www.pocketpcthoughts.com/forums/viewtopic.php?p=428534 , http://www.howardforums.com/showthread.php?t=1091673 , http://www.howardforums.com/showthread.php?t=1092210 , http://forum.brighthand.com/showthread.php?t=236000 and http://forum.xda-developers.com/showthread.php?t=290504 .

UPDATE (04/10/2007): Just Another Mobile Monday frontpage