Opera Mini gets the lion's share of the attention among third-party browsers for Windows Mobile, but there are other contenders out there looking for a share of users' hearts and minds. Replacement browsers probably wouldn't be such a vibrant category on the platform if it weren't for Pocket Internet Explorer's utter ineptitude in its current iteration, but hey, it is what it is -- we're just happy that devs are out there coding up much better stuff (
Microsoft included). Anyhoo, ACCESS has just taken the Technical Preview of its NetFront 3.4 release for Windows Mobile to the public with a couple awesome features in tow like visual bookmarks and full-page preview. NetFront powers the browsers on a number of phones from Sony Ericsson, Samsung, and others, and we've generally found it to be good stuff; anyone give 3.4 a shot yet?
[Via
jkOnTheRun and
Brighthand]
Update: Turns out 3.4's been doing its thing for quite some time now; ACCESS has simply extended the expiration date through to February 29 of next year. Thanks, commenters!
posted Dec 4th 2007 at 11:49PM
Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)
bessie31 @ Dec 5th 2007 3:59AM
"Anyhoo, ACCESS has just taken the Technical Preview of its NetFront 3.4 release for Windows Mobile to the public with a couple"
that's a lie it's been out for months ;). i've had it for a month and a half!
Chris, let me assure you it is great. Very stable, more so than IE. It renders pages very accurately, but the old Beta I've been using did not support Flash. As with Opera 9, I can't wait to see if they will dare put that in.
With PagePilot, it tries to do a minimap feature to mimic Nokia Browser but it does not do it horizontally, only vertically.
Visual bookmarks is all hype and I did not find it very practical. It is only limited to 10 pages. Overall on the Beta version I had, the menu system had a TON of customization features better suited for power users.
Ajax support is also still limited.
Thankfully it supports multiple tabs and works with some authentication systems (like my University's) that pocket IE simply can't handle.
That's really all I can say. Mostly I just wanted to point out how this isn't new news haha.
Ari @ Dec 5th 2007 6:20AM
Actually, this has been out for somewhere around a year now. In fact, it has been around so long, that they have stopped selling the non-beta 3.3 version and are directing people to download the 3.4 technical preview. I'm actually kind of pissed because this is the second time the 3.4 beta has gone past the program expiration date shown on the site and built into the program and I was hoping they'd release the actual release version this time. By the way, to bessie31, the old beta actually does support lash, you just have to turn it on in "plugins" in the settings. Also, the visual bookmarks simply don't work in the version I have been using till now. Netfront Browser is really the only real competitor to Opera currently for Windows Mobile operating systems, but I tend to like Opera's rendering better and seems slightly faster on my phone. However on the plus side for Netfront is the free factor of the beta.
bessie31 @ Dec 5th 2007 11:33AM
hmm, no kidding, flash? ill give this a shot after i reinstall with the new beta hahah. thanks for the tip!
henry @ Dec 18th 2007 5:29PM
im downloading this now. im so sick of opera 4 i could scream. it's decided that it likes resetting my RSS subscriptions every 45 minutes or so. even if the program is open! look at a feed, look at another feed, go back to the feeds page... they're gone. resubscribe, look at a few... back to the feeds page and they're gone AGAIN. that and the fact their proxy server went down for like a day last week... whatever. they've lost me.