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your Windows® embedded community
Windows For Devices
your Windows® embedded community
According to the company, the upgrade to v4.0 brings JavaScript performance that is some 20 times faster, as illustrated in the graphic below. It's claimed the new version brings a "significantly better browsing experience overall," thanks to faster page loading, drawing, and rendering. The browser also switches more quickly between its "desktop" and "smart-fit" rendering modes, according to the company.
In our testing, we found that compared to other Windows Mobile web browsers -- such as the recently updated Opera Mobile 10, which is also freely downloadable -- NetFront v4.0 has a rather "bare bones" interface, without much to entice the casual user. We suspect that the Concept Version is intended mainly for carrier testing, a premise that Access underlines by stating, "Customers who have already ported NetFront Browser v3.5 can migrate to NetFront Browser v4.0 with minimal effort because the APIs and porting layers for both browser versions are compatible."
Indeed, Access claims carriers in the U.S., France, Germany, Great Britain, Italy, and Spain, have put versions of NetFront on more handset models than any other mobile browser. Carrier-friendly features in the browser include compatibility with Bytemobile's EBO (embedded browser optimization) technology, in which NetFront communicates with Bytemobile's carrier-based "Optimization Services Nodes" (OSNs). When these nodes are available, compression and other techniques allow page downloads to happen up to four times faster, NetFront says.
NetFront does offer one user-friendly feature in the form of a "PagePilot" thumbnail feature (above, right) that pops up to provide an overall map of a web page, giving an indication as to what part of it is being viewed. Further, the browser's enhanced column rendering mode is said to do a better job of keeping text within a device's screen width, while also preserving as much of a website's intended appearance as possible.
Background
Hot on the heels of Opera Mobile 9.5, NetFront 3.5 became the second Windows Mobile browser to tout support for widgets. Widgets are small applications that use a browser's rendering engine to run, but not its standard border, menus, and other "chrome." As such, widgets can appear on part of a device's screen or take it over temporarily.
For the end user, widgets have the advantage of providing easy access to content such as updated weather information, news headlines, local maps, and photo feeds. For carriers and software developers, however, their significance is even greater. Widgets can easily be used to create branded user interfaces on a device, without the complicated process of modifying its ROM or compiled software applications.
Like Google's similar "gadget" technology, widgets are designed using web standards such as Extensible Hypertext Markup Language (XHTML), Cascading Style Sheets (CSS), JavaScript, Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG), and Document Object Model (DOM). However, minor changes are apparently required in order to "port" widgets between NetFront, Opera, and Google implementations.
As in previous versions, NetFront 4.0 has a "highly modular and scalable software architecture [that] enables developers to pick and choose only needed components for their target devices," the company says. The two components that allow this portability are the SLIM interface (seen in the third row below), which encapsulates all dependencies on the target platform, and the Plate Windows System (PWS), a windowing API that generalizes and settles the differences in window manipulations from the underlying operating system.
Noted limitations of the free trial version are that it does not include technical support, expires on June 30, does not support plug-ins, and becomes unstable if it is installed on external storage and a device is turned off.
