IE6 for Windows Mobile still coming “this year”

September 11, 2008 | By Surur

Microsoft has been showing of its port of IE6 on the Windows Mobile platform. Tim McDonough, a senior director in Microsoft’s Windows Mobile unit, showed CNET the browser running the standard MSN home page on a Windows Mobile Standard device.

“The market today is really at ‘Can I see a page?’ Very quickly we’re getting to ‘Can I do something?’” he said. “That’s where we will really shine.” The biggest benefit will be the fact that it is the full IE 6 rendering engine, meaning that any page that renders properly in IE 6 on the PC should do just fine on Windows Mobile. The browser also promises Flash support and other improvements.

Another interesting option on IE 6 is the ability to quickly shift from a site’s mobile page to its standard desktop version. Just because IE 6 can show the full site, doesn’t mean that’s always what people want. IE 6 toggles between mobile and standard Web pages by sending a different user agent, depending on which page type a user wants to see.

McDonough didn’t offer much of an update on timing for IE 6, except to say that “it’s still this year.”

The need for an improved browser on Windows Mobile has recently become much less acute following Opera’s release of Opera Mobile 9.5 on many high-end devices and as a free beta download.

Source:CNET.com

About Surur

Site Admin and Windows Phone enthusiast, he has been using Windows Mobile devices since before they were called PocketPC’s. He is currently sporting a HTC 7 Trophy.

Tagged browser, browsers, microsoft, windows mobile

Ken

Will this be available for WM5 smartphones?

(I’m awaiting the Touch Pro, so maybe this question won’t even matter by the time IE6 is released.)
admin

The way MS and WM works, they will release the browser to ODM’s to bake into their ROM updates and new products. Its unlikely to be downloadable as a stand-alone solution, and may depend on other components of WM6.1

This is not a huge problem however, as XDA-developers will either free it up as a cab, or make it available as an independent ROM update for your particular device.
http://www.j2i.net joel

Hmmm…it would be much preferrable to get the browser update as a new ROM image. If the browser is a part of the ROM and is in ROM with the XIP (Execute in Place) attribute then when running it, the device will execute the code directly from ROM without loading it to RAM. If the browser is installed into flash memory or a storage card then inaddition to consuming memory on one’s file system the program will have to be copied to RAM before it is run making it consume more resources than a ROM loaded version.

Unfortunatly if the update must go through the OEM then it will probably have to go through carrier approval to and the end result is that it could take a decent amount of time from the release of the browser before some end users see it, and other end users may never see it if their carrier decides not to allow the upgrade to come to their phone.
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xchicagoan5

I just got off an internal IE6 meeting at MS. It will not come in a downloadable .cab file. We will have to get someone at XDA to take it from a ROM because it is only being delivered to OEMs and carriers today.