Another Alternative Web Browser News: Minimo 0.011 Released - A Review

http://www.mozilla.org/projects/minimo/

Minimo is a limited-resource Window Mobile port of the well-known browser Mozilla. It is being developed and enhanced by leaps and bounds and can be quite usable even in its present form. It's, of course, a far cry away from the desktop browser but, compared to its alternatives on the Pocket PC, is pretty good. In this article, I elaborate on both the advantages and disadvantages of the latest version (released yesterday) of Minimo and show some real-world examples of it "in action". Installation Get the installer EXE file from here or the CAB installer file from here. Execute the former on your desktop computer or the latter on your PDA (you may also want to read this blog entry on installing a CAB file to any location if you go with the latter). You can install the application in both the RAM and onto alternative storage. The latter may be a bit/lot slower than the former, though – at least at loading. (On my Pocket Loox 720, with a well-optimized storage card, there's no speed difference between the two solutions at runtime, after loading.) Advantages/great news new to version 0.11 1. It has in-page text find capabilities: Click for screenshot Click for screenshot In this, it's much better than PIE (even with PIE plug-ins) and Thunderhawk. The latter aren't able to search in the in-page text; it's only NetFront and, now, Minimo are able to do this. 2. Page cache (not enabled by default; you, therefore, may want to enable it): Click for screenshot Unfortunately, the cache is by default in the main RAM, under \Windows\Mozilla\minimo\Cache\. I haven't checked whether it can be easily relocated to a memory card in order to keep the RAM free. Note that not even commercial browsers/services are bound to have caches. For example, Thunderhawk doesn't have any kind of local caching. Local caches, if correctly written (that is, unlike with, say, pre-3.2 NetFront versions, which had a buggy caching algorithm), can tremendously reduce internet bandwidth usage/speed up page loading. Other, remarkable advantages, introduced in earlier versions of Minimo 1. It already has tab (multipage) support (unlike the built-in Pocket Internet Explorer or Thunderhawk – you need a third-party add-on for PIE to have tabbing support. Please see for example this blog entry on one of these PIE plug-ins, the free and great ftxPBrowser) and some other goodies – for example, excellent Javascript support. 2. It, naturally, also lets you (locally) define a HTTP proxy; therefore, using (local) compressor proxies like toonel or OnSpeed will be possible (please read this for more information on using these): Click for screenshot (HTTP proxy support is also painfully missing from Thunderhawk.) 3. As opposed to version 0.10, it no longer crashes upon logging in to Yahoo Mail, which is great news now that Yahoo Mail no longer can be used in non-read only mode without turning to online content stripping services or Thunderhawk. Everything works (except for subtleties like Yahoo AutoComplete): Click for screenshot As you can see, you can even reply to mail/forward it, unlike in NetFront/PIE: Click for screenshot Unfortunately, file upload doesn't work and the same stands for, say, Yahoo Address Book functionality. That is, none of the links will work on the following page: Click for screenshot Note that the RSS (roughly, the Minimo equvalent of WM2003SE+ PIE's One-column view mode) is enabled by default (the above Yahoo screenshots were made without it). You may want to disable it in Preferences, particularly if JavaScript scripts (for example, the Yahoo Mail reply/forward mail buttons) don't work. The problems - The Copy function still doesn't work on hyperlinks (it puts some meaningless characters on the clipboard): Click for screenshot - The application can use a lot CPU cycles even when it's absolutely not necessary (it's idle). The idle CPU usage is between 10 and 35% on my WM2003 iPAQ 2210; on the Yahoo Mail log-on screen, for example, it's around 30%, as can be seen in the following screenshot: Click for screenshot On WM2003SE devices, the situation is better. - the Pocket PC needs to be reset before Minimo can be restarted. I run into this problem on both the (freshly hard reset) iPAQ 2210 and the PL720. - on the WM2003SE PL720 (along with some other, mostly WM5 people – see for example this thread) I've run into the problem of inability to enter URL's: after entering a new URL in the address bar and pressing Enter, nothing happens. To circumvent the problem, I had to enter the URL in the "home page" field n Preferences and restart Minimo (which also means resetting the PPC) to be able to navigate to the given page. It's very annoying! - no support for favorites accessible to all the other browsers (PIE, NetFront, Thunderhawk) - neither the ones in the file system nor the ones in the Registry. - As with all the previous builds I've tested it on, pretty slow on the WM2003 iPAQ 2210, even when run from RAM and after a hard reset, not having installed anything else on the PDA and not using the local cache. On the WM2003SE Fujitsu-Siemens Pocket Loox 720, on the other hand, it's tolerably fast. - The Settings screen on VGA devices, in standard SE VGA, use double-pixeled checkboxes, as can be seen in the following screenshot (fortunately, there isn't much to set): Click for screenshot These dialogs, of course, are OK on a QVGA device (here, a WM2003 iPAQ 2210): Click for screenshot - Not compatible with pre-WM2003 devices. (No way to be run on a PPC2k2 device – checked on my iPAQ 3660.) - It doesn't really have hidden functionality - already working funtionality that hasn't been assigned a GUI yet but already accessible via hand-edited configuration files. That is, there's no point in trying to, say, hand-deploy for example these parameters to \Windows\Mozilla\minimo\prefs.js (I've tested). Bottom line All in all, it's still a work-in-progress. It may be worth checking out – hope it runs on your particular device well. Recommended links If you need information on any of the alternative Web browsers and their capabilities, make sure you read the Bible of Pocket PC Web Browsers (alternatives: iPAQ HQ, AximSite, PPC Magazine, FL, BrightHand) A quick review of Minimo 0.009 (alternatives: iPAQ HQ, AximSite, PPC Magazine, FirstLoox, BrightHand). EDIT (Dec-16-2005): I've made some additional Javascript compliance tests with the new Minimo version; please read THIS