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Iris web browser for Windows Mobile uses same engine as Safari
If you're starting to feel like every few days someone is announcing a new or updated web browser for Windows Mobile, you're not wrong. Hot on the heels of NetFront 3.5 beta and the announcement of Opera Mobile 9.5, Torch Mobile has launched a public beta of the new Iris browser for Windows Mobile. What makes the Iris browser different is that it's based on WebKit, the same rendering engine used in the Safari web browser for Windows, Mac, and iPhone. That means that pretty much any web page that you can view in Safari should be accessible using the Iris browser.
Iris also sports a slew of attractive features:
- Customizable interface
- Zoom feature
- Multiple tabs and windows
- Touch screen control
- Rotating
- Pop-up blockers
[via Coolsmartphone]
Comments
12
Subscribe to commentsTushFeb 11th 2008 5:31PM
Just tried it on my x51v... but it won't run. It says something like, "one of the components can't be found".
Oh well, netfront 3.5 beta is pretty great.
Iris has a nice icon...
JonFeb 11th 2008 5:31PM
I gave it a go and I'm afraid to say it's very slow and buggy... but then again it still is in beta.
KevinFeb 11th 2008 6:25PM
I tried it, never loaded full page and kept on giving me the usual A problem has occurred with irisbrowser.exe Please Tell Microsoft bla bla bla... On the Samsung SCH-i760.
EPFeb 11th 2008 7:39PM
Do you guys with problems even have WM6 on your device?? I know the X51V doesn't (I have one) and the post says it will only work on WM6 devices an newer...
dreFeb 11th 2008 7:45PM
why is it that all the new bets and the new browsers are for touch screen or stylus? i have a moto q smartphone and im stuck with IE or paying for opera. any ideas?
EPFeb 11th 2008 8:20PM
Because it's far more intuitive to use a touch screen device and most new devices are touch screen (including the new Sony Ericsson x1 phone). :)
ParanoisedFeb 12th 2008 8:15AM
I tried it, while it still needs a lot of work, it does render web pages correctly and displays javascript better than any other winmo browser I tried. It was able to load all optimized for iphone pages I threw at it, however it loaded slower and ajax animations are pretty slow as well.
Also the browser doesn't appear to be optomized for a low resolution screen. I ran it on my HTC TyTn with 320x240 screen resolution and even the start page didnt look quite right.
masaFeb 12th 2008 8:20AM
I tested on my HTC Touch. This browser dosn't work very good. He doesn't show themes on the blogs. All appear with white pages and black police. Otherwise website appear slowly and scrolling are so slow too.
I will hope this beta will get best update ;)
JoeApr 30th 2008 1:30PM
"one of the components can't be found".
I have a Sprint HTC Touch with WM6 (stock, unhacked), but Iris will not work ... any ideas? Please hit reply ...thanks
GarrettFeb 12th 2008 10:20PM
The browser installed fine on my HTC 6800. As mentioned, it appears to still be very sluggish at rendering, scrolling, and even loading for that matter.
Loading iphone.facebook.com proved successful, but as Paranoised stated, it doesn't really look quite right on a low-res screen such as the 6800. Zooming out to 50% brings everything into view as you would find it on the iPhone, but text is not legible (sans 36-point Arial Bold...but whatever. :)
It's a great start, and I hope the developers pour their heart and soul into the project. Given time and effort, the browser has great potential to give PIE and Opera Mobile a run for their money.
vankongaFeb 26th 2008 7:41AM
Hello,
I just tried it on my HTC Wizard (Qtek 9000) with VGA screen and it seems to run fine, rendering of pages is the best I've seen so far. Loading and scrolling is a bit slow but not really slower than PIE or Opera and Minimo is actually slower.
It doesn't have all features yet, but manual zoom works fine, tabs also (through menu...), javascript compatibility is pretty impressive. Some small bugs like if you go in fullscreen all the menus disappear and you need to press the Ok hardware button to get out of it. There is no context menu anywhere, even in the bookmark manager.
A good and promising start, they just need to make it faster and to rethink the user interface.
KedavixMar 22nd 2008 10:00AM
According to the Touch Mobile website, where I found a link titled "Download a free preview of the Iris Browser for Windows Mobile® 5 & 6" I guess its safe to say that this works on both Windows Mobile 5 and 6 on contrary to what was stated in the article post.