Samsung Epix Forums

hai guys,

I found another alternative webbrowser for WindowsMobile, called NetFront. It's tech-specs reads rather well. the “concept”/trial version is free until end of february of 2009. to DL here https://www.access.co.jp/english/nfppc/send.php?type=4 – it will as you for your name (enter “anything” – NOT literally meaning ) and your email address (you can use http://www.mailinator.com for that)

I'll try it out and keep you posted/updated.

EDIT1: playing around with it some, here some preliminary experiences:

- it's smaller than Opera 9.x Beta

- it seems to eat more RAM than Opera 9.x beta

- it's somewhat slower in “web-page user resonse” in terms of scrolling/panning, Opera 9.x beta is way faster in panning/scrolling

- it's a lot faster in 'compiling'/rendering/loading the webpage, than Opera 9.x beta

- some major websites have issues recognizing the webbrowser. Yahoo.com 'bitches' with a “upgrade your browser, you wont see jack-shit with this one” at me; msn.com shows me the “mobile version” of their site. arstechnica.com works seemingly  fast/accurate. myspace.com renders well except the heavy Flash parts. facebook.com points initially to the mobile-version but can render the whole site, again except where Flash is involved. CNN.com and Time.com also render like the Desktop counterparts (missing flash though).

- TONS  (heavy emphasis, as you can tell ) of user-editable features and settings, down to the manually editable “User-Agent”-string, by which every webserver identifies what your webbrowser is capable of in terms of features/plug-ins. It identifies itself (default) as “USER AGENT: Mozilla/5.0 (PDA; NF35WMPRO/1.0; like Gecko) NetFront/3.5″ it's almost as 'bad'(read: good) in terms of settings, as with a desktop PC webbrowser. including which file-extensions are suppose to be executed/used/handled by program X with.

- Flash is not supported in this “preview/concept” mode/executable package.

This isnt a “consumers”/dummy-friendly mobile browser, this is a geek's-heaven type of webbrowser. you can explicitly change settings to just about what T-stroke and i-dot the webbrowser is suppose to do w. webpages, their content and how to display/render it.

It is not pretty/fashionable, but it does it's job fast and very much capable.

cheers

@

well, to compare: i hooked my epix to my WIFI g (so it's not impaired by network congestions) and loaded in both browsers the start/index-page of http://www.arstechnica.com (a mid-lvl to hardcore tech/geek/I.T.-Pro site).

Opera 9.5 beta needed roughly 70 seconds for the 'main content' from the 'main site', and another 10-20 seconds to load 'additional content' from 'secondary sites' (i.e. advertising). I noticed that Opera uses an interesting way to load content. first it loads everything from the actual sites' IP-address (which is usually the desired main content),to be “user-readable/-available” then goes through the HTML-code to get embedded content from other sites'/IP-adresses. Finally it took roughly another 30 seconds to 'straighten-up/finish-up' the zoomed-out rendering/re-formatting the text to screen-format (re-flow). Although the last 30 seconds it seemed it wasnt really doing anything, just the progressbar was “stuck”. I presume Opera was “waiting” for “something” and then timed-out, self-canceling any subsequent Get/Fetch-routines.

Netfront took about 25 seconds for entire page, including 'reflow' the text to screen-format. Bear in mind that NetFront does NOT the zoomed/whole page-to-screen fitting re-rendering.

hope that helps

cheers

@