At CTIA this year in April, Windows Mobile announced plans to port IE 6 from the desktop to the device.  The port has been completed and this version is now officially called Internet Explorer Mobile 6.

Microsoft today announced at Tech Ed Barcelona the availability of the IE Mobile 6 emulators for developers during the “Internet Explorer Mobile 6 Preview: Leveraging web technologies for fun and profit” session

The interesting stuff about this is that instead of creating a new separate version of a mobile browser, IEM6 is based on IE6 from Windows XP. This isn’t the actual version as IE8 is on the horizon, but this doesn’t have to be the case.

The main features of IEM6 are:

· Features the rendering engine from IE6 on the PC

· Fixes layout for mobile screens, like f.e. text wrapping

· Supporting Adobe Flash Lite 3.1

· Enhanced Script and AJAX support with Jscript 5.7 from IE8!

Instead of just having an “updated” mobile browser, which wouldn’t make a lot of sense compared to an Opera Mobile or Skyfire browser, IE6M also supports Touch, Gesture and multiple Zoom Levels and Panning. This brings this browser on a level with the aforementioned mobile browsers.

In contrast to other browsers IEM6 enables you to switch between a Mobile and Desktop Mode, which enables you to view the general version of a homepage, or the optimized one for mobile browsers, if supported.

Therefore a support for tabbed browsing like Opera Mobile is missing. I hope this feature is on schedule for a future version.

The main problem I actually see for this browser is, that an installable version as a CAB-File isn’t actually on the schedule. It is supposed to be delivered through a firmware upgrade from your OEM. Especially in Germany this can become very ugly, as this means you aren’t only relying on the OEM offering firmware upgrade for your device, but your provider as well, as he is the one “ordering” a new version of a particular branded firmware version for his devices. This means, getting IEM6 on your device can become very hard. Probably OEMs will ship the browser with new devices, which would make sense from a marketing perspective.

The release for IE6M is scheduled for Q3 2008, which means you shall see devices with IEM6 in the market by the end of calendar year 2008.
I’ve had the chance to preview IEM6, using the emulator that was announced today. As it isn’t available yet as a firmware for my present devices I had to check it with a device emulator image. By this performance itself can’t be measured correctly.

Opening IEM6 it presents itself at the first glimpse like the previous version:

Opening the Mainmenu presents most of the new features:

Trying youtube.com proves that it is working with IEM6:

As you see, having zoomed in, the mainmenu offers the possibility to zoom in or out via the main menu. It can be achieved through the touchscreen directly, but for supporting Windows Mobile 6 Standard Devices (Smartphones) without a touchscreen, this feature is available for those devices as well.

Testing Expedia.de, which actually failed on my Opera Mobile proved, that IEM6 works correctly here.

The options page hasn’t changed much in this version:

Conclusion

IE6M has potential for being a good mobile browser, compared to Opera or Skyfire. The advantage is that the rendering engine of IE6 is used, so that a lot of more pages get displayed correctly whereas other mobile browsers fail. Most websites for the desktop are designed and tested for IE as reflected by the following statistics - http://marketshare.hitslink.com/report.aspx?qprid=0. By porting IE 6 for the desktop to the device, Windows Mobile has effectively expanded the user base for the developers of these websites. IE Mobile 6 also extends the web experiences that end-users are familiar with on the desktop to the device, while giving end-users the flexibility of choosing to view mobile versions of websites if they prefer that.

On the other hand Opera is already delivered in ROMs with most of the latest devices making it unlikely that OEMs are going to upgrade ROMs for existing devices.

To become successful mobile browser MS HAS TO make a CAB-Installation available for upgrading actual devices.

You can download the Emulator Windows Mobile 6.1.4 Emulator Images here.