“Enterprise stalwart Research In Motion showed off its new faster, smoother, all-round better WebKit-powered browser today at Mobile World Congress. RIM’s BlackBerry has long been popular with corporate customers; with the new browser, the company wants to broaden the device’s appeal to attract more non-business users to the platform.”
HTML5, 100/100 ACID3.
As Gruber puts it–Every major mobile platform is now either using WebKit or will be soon. Except for one.
Desktop capabilities is the expected standard of mobile browsers. Where does this leave IE6, honestly? Whilst WinPho7s is a clean break, Microsoft should have also taken that opportunity to ditch IE and go WebKit too. They’ve shot themselves here, I do hope when it comes to release they’ve worked magic with IE or ditched it entirely.
I’m not, nor is anybody else, going to write for such a crippled browser when we’ve got the WebKit majority (inc. hardware accelerated CSS transitions).
For all we know, the new mobile IE version is really, really good once WP7S is released. History suggests otherwise, yes, but then again – history also suggested Microsoft wouldn’t make clean brakes. History also suggests Microsoft wouldn’t come up with a unique and new interface.
I say, let’s wait until the WP7S is here before crucifying them. I actually hope Microsoft sticks to mobile IE, but makes it really, really good, and a decent competitor for WebKit. Competition is good, and this en masse flocking to WebKit as The One True Mobile Engine is bad.
Let Fennec come. Let that new mobile IE come.
I truely believe an healthy ecosystem has (at least) 3 competitors.
All between 20% to 50% market share. Such numbers would provide funding for all and spur innovation. Nobody could ever get complacecent.
So yes we need IE, BUT it needs to bleed marketshare really hard so that being great & competitive will be a must.
And for all we know it will suck, like every other IE in the past years. I hope I will be surprised though.
It’s the same IE version as in Zune HD. Not bad, but not great either.
The main problem with mobile IE is that Microsoft does not have any decent engine. Sure there is the IE8 engine, but it is technologically where Moziall 2.0 was sans SVG support, the world has moved on and Microsoft is playing catchup exactly the period they were slumbering on the dissolved IE6 team (about 3-4 years)
I dont have high hopes, my only hope is someone will do a webkit for WinMo7…
You can do a lot already with the webkit engine and again Microsoft is holding everyone back by pushing their own garbage.
Two if you count Maemo-cum-MeeGo/Fennec.
Maemo 5 uses Gecko. MeeGo / Maemo 6 will use the Qt port of WebKit.
This depends on how much marketshare Winmo will get, the IE in Winmo7 is clearly inferior to anything else out on the market, but the problem is the users are agnostic to all those problems they just want to use a browser to surf the web, and again the integrated IE probably will be good enough and will put everyone again into the pain of not being able to leverage what would be possible entirely (SVG anyone? Canvas Tag, embedded HTML video, javascript persistences, javascript threads, real websockets etc…)
Edited 2010-02-21 09:59 UTC
Just installed the Opera Mini 5 beta on my curve last night and came away impressed. A much nicer browser than what comes stock. It’ll be nice to see RIM push back with its own offering. Hooray for competition!
I find Opera lacks integration on the Blackberry. The keys shortcuts are different which is a big no no. Also, you couldn’t edit text fields directly, you have to go to a separate text editing screen. I also don’t think that Opera can install applications.
When installing applications Opera will just launch the BlackBerry browser instead.
BlackBerry devices had some sort of way to write native apps for it.. so i could get more powerful apps, games, etc.
…for posting this. In the entire time I’ve followed osnews, this is the first BlackBerry article I can remember that wasn’t about a legal dispute.