DIYers IT Zone

Minimo is a web browser, which is currently only for Windows Mobile 4.2 (PocketPC 2003) and Windows Mobile 5, which is based on the Gecko. It takes many of Firefox’s features onto a PDA; the most useful being tabbed browsing. In my opinion, it is interestingly Web 2.0.Like Firefox, it probably takes more resources up than Internet Explorer, but PIE isn’t a pre-alpha, however it does boast some useful features Pocket Internet Explorer does not have. For those not familiar with PocketPCs, Pocket Internet Explorer does not allow more than one site to be open at a time. As you may imagine, this lowers productivity. Another advantage of Minimo is the fact it complies to more standards than PIE.

The browser shares many of Firefox’s characteristics. The most notable is that the tab view is basically the same, as is the options. Naturally, it differs greatly from Firefox as it needs to fit onto a small screen. So the navigation buttons (back, forwards and refresh), the menus and status bar are lost. Many features are placed into the two menus, which are launchable by the icons on either side of the address bar.

The user can choose to view a page as either a single column, under small screen rendering, or as it would look on a desktop PC. Overall, I would say this rendering is superb, and pages load well in both portrait and landscape. In desktop mode, it literally opned y page how I would expect it to on a desktop. It can even reads RSS, and converts it into a headline view. However, it is not an aggregator.

The program lacks the ability to add extensions, and also it lacks a search box. I hope these will be added nearer to it’s 1.0 release (currently it is 0.016!). I believe Mozilla should promote this project more, as Pocket Internet Explorer is subpar, and Opera costs money.