Alternative, free Web browser Minimo 0.013 Release Candidate 1 is out!

http://www.meer.net/~dougt/pre/minimo_013rc1.zip

Minimo, the only free (as far as decent and up-to-date applications are concerned - not, for example, the also free, but really incapable Q browser) browsers for the Pocket PC, is being developed by leaps and bounds. The latest, 0.013 version (which is also a Release Candidate 1) proved to be a very pleasant surprise in my thorough compatibility, usability and speed tests. The last, 0.012 version was released about two months ago (see the review if interested). In the meantime, a lot has been changed. Read on for the full comparison! Please note that this review is not a step-by-step introduction to the browser but, rather, a comparison to the previous versions (and the alternative Pocket PC browsers). Please read the linked articles on the previous version(s) if you want to know where the browser came from and what the older versions were look like. Context Menus They (link context menu, selection context menu, image context menu), unfortunately, havent changed much. That is, it's (still?) impossible to save images, copy links, copy image links, see alternate image texts etc. This does need some work to achieve the same capabilities of, say, Netfront or most PIE/IEM plug-ins. The same stands for configuration dialogs – they are the same as in the previous version. Main Menus They, on the other hand, have changed a lot. Now, there're two menus – the main menu invokable by tapping the icon in the bottom left and the navigation menu on the bottom right. Fortunately, niceties already present in the main menus of previous versions like in-page text search, painfully missing from all other PPC browsers except Netfront, are still here and working just great. Page Loading Progress Bar It works (see the colored background in the location field!), unlike in previous versions. It reliably shows how many percent of the page/related resources has been downloaded. File Download Another welcome addition is downloading files, which didn't work in the previous versions. Now it works. Minimo even offers the standard Windows Mobile file dialog so you can effortlessly choose it to be saved on a storage card, just like in Pocket Internet Explorer/Internet Explorer Mobile or NetFront. This is diametrically opposed to the approach of the Opera beta, where the download path is wired into one of the configuration files and that of the latest some days ago released Thunderhawk, which is only able to download into main memory. As with Pocket Internet Explorer/Internet Explorer Mobile, it also displays a download progress bar while/after downloading – see the textfield with the green background (showing that the particular download has been completed) in this screenshot. You can safely close this by just clicking the cross at the left after the download has finished. There is another button, "Reveal location" in here, on the right; if you click it, the location of the downloaded file will be displayed . This is also very handy, especially for novice users or people that have forgotten where they downloaded the last file to. Scrolling Unfortunately, by default, the application uses 'jump by link' scrolling (in all operating systems – not just WM5, of which you may also want to read this tutorial, as far as scrolling is concerned), which may be found pretty awkward by most users. The new, "Enable arrow key scrolling" setting in the main menu is, therefore, welcome news. Unfortunately, it only allows for row-based scrolling and not page scrolling and you can't set the scrolling percentage anywhere (unlike in, say, NetFront). It's still better than link jump-based scrolling because you will always know by what percentage the page scrolls. If your Pocket PC also has a jog dial, it will work exactly the same was as the D-pad. That is, by default, it uses link jumping and if you enable "Enable arrow key scrolling", it'll scroll by some 15-20 pixels a time. Major problems with non-ASCII characters Minimo has (still!) problems with pages that have 8859-1 text/html encoding; for example, GeekZone's operator branding article, which uses the (standard) hexa 96 character for hyphens, as can be seeen in this HTML source hexa shot. Non-ASCII characters like hyphens (–) with character code larger than 128 will cause problems to Minimo; for example, see this screenshot (at the bottom of the page). Also note that other characters, for example, the "opening" and the "closing" " marks are also rendered as squares in the same and the previous rows. Another example of this, 8859-1-encoded case is the Finnish accents at Jippii. It, fortunately, has no problems with UTF-8-encoded pages like Tero Lehto's PDA/mobile blog (Finnish!). Incidentally, the last-mentioned lehto.net blog has a very long frontpage (currently, 117 kbytes) and the beta version of Opera chokes at it miserably. Minimo doesn't. I've never encountered any problems with long pages with the new Minimo version – unlike with the beta version of Opera, which doesn't render anything after the first 20-30 kbytes. WM5 application keys (Tested on the HTC Wizard.) WM5 hardware keys are supported – to a certain degree. With the left button, you can iterate between the main menu, the address bar (this is invisible in full screen mode and, therefore, it's pretty useless to iterate over it in full screen mode) and the navigation menu. You can use the D-pad (or, if your device has a keyboard, the cursor keys) but you can't use the Action key to choose a menu item – it keeps invoking the current link the focus is on. It's only with the Enter key on the slide-out keyboard that you can choose an item. The right button is only used to hide/show the on-screen keyboard. Minor annoyances On some devices (the HTC Wizard), you can't really fast scroll the page by dragging the thumbnail. This caused no problems on my other test Pocket PC's. When you switch to Preferences from the main menu, the Minimo window disappears for about a second. This may have an effect as if Minimo had crashed. After that, however, the Preferences screen appears. Device compatibility Even the latest, 0.012 version had a lot of problems with several models – for example, the HP iPAQ 2210. On the 2210, the program was unacceptably slow and kept consuming around 20-30% CPU time all the time – even when doing nothing. This is no longer the case - it's working wonderfully, snappily on all my test devices (Dell Axim x51v A06, HTC Wizard with Qtek ROM 1.6.9.1, HP iPAQ 2210, Fujitsu-Siemens Pocket Loox 720). (On the HTC Wizard, though, you may want to consider overclocking your HTC Wizard to make it even more snappier.) It didn't have any problems with the left-hand landscape mode of the Wizard (unlike even the latest, as HTC Wizard-compliant advertised, WM5 Thunderhawk). You can safely switch between the two orientations by sliding in/out the keyboard. The cursor keys also worked on the Wizard screen as supposed to (unlike with Thunderhawk). Compliance Tests The complex Yahoo Mail test (SSL test, JavaScript compliance test, file upload test): passed. What is more, Minimo is the only PPC browser capable of rendering the Yahoo mail button submenus. Note, however, that these submenus won't be visible in the default, enabled SSR mode. Therefore, you may want to disable this feature in Preferences. Verdict I can only recommend this browser. The new version is orders of magnitude better than version 0.012. It's certainly not as fast as Opera, but, if you take into account its price (free) and ability to render long pages, having a tabbed interface and using native GUI components (you will always see everything you've entered into text areas, unlike with Opera), it has a chance against the current beta of Opera, even on WM5, which is "traditionally" owned by Opera. Pre-WM5 operating systems, where the current beta of Opera is, because of the "stalling bug" pretty awkward to use, Minimo is indeed a decent alternative. If only the character encoding problems with non-UTF-8 pages were fixed... Recommended reading Roundup of Web Browsers (alternatives: iPAQ HQ, AximSite, FirstLoox, PPC Magazine, BrightHand). Please make sure you also follow the links in these threads to my newer articles. ADDITION (18:38 CET): this AximSite thread is worth checking out.