News

The only nice Internet Explorer is not IE8. It's IE Mobile. Ever heard of it?

The wit of commentators is being exercised by the hint of a new version of Microsoft's own web browser: will Internet Explorer version 8 ship? What will it be called? - and all, of course, of no interest to users of the far more standard product that mobile users have... IE Mobile.

Actually, you'd be hard pushed to find much wit or wisdom about IE Mobile or Pocket IE, as we mobile users still call it. Perhaps it's just accepted as a good product? It's not mentioned in the IE8 blog

Confused? If you go to the excellent Wikipedia, you'll be even more confused. You'll be pointed to the official IE Mobile blog, launched by Randy Ramig, development lead on IE Mobile:

Our latest version of IE Mobile was released with Windows Mobile 5.0. A note on naming: IE Mobile is the browser formerly known as Pocket Internet Explorer. Prior to Windows Mobile 5.0, the browser was called Pocket Internet Explorer, or PocketIE, or pIE as we (still) affectionately call it around here. With WM 5.0, it is now called IE Mobile. Same browser.

Yes, we knew all that, thanks Randy. What about this blog?

Now that we have Windows Mobile 5.0 and IEMobile out the door, we are finally getting a chance to get the word out about our browser. [Hooray! - Ed] To that end, we have created this blog. [Hooray again! - Ed] We are also working on getting our MSDN documentation updated for WM5.0. In the meantime, if you want to find out more about IE Mobile, I recommend checking out a WebCast I did for the Windows Mobile 2003 Second Edition release.

Anybody who knows a bit about Windows Mobile will be frowning at this point. Windows Mobile 5.0? That is old, old news! I remember a http://www.newswireless.net/index.cfm/article/3686 press release entitled "Microsoft Reveals New Windows Mobile 6 Smartphone Software, Improves World's Fastest-Growing Mobile Operating System" from the 3GSM show - February this year! What is Randy on? Apparently, history:

We will get some more, updated information to you on our feature and standards support in Windows Mobile 5.0. Stay tuned!

Published Tuesday, October 04, 2005 10:36 PM by iemoblog No, it does not mean that the IE Mobile Blog has just the one entry, dated four years ago - that was just the first entry. Go to the latest entry and (to everybody's great relief!) you'll find useful stuff about Ajax and IE mobile support of Active X (oh, dear) and Flash support.

There's even a section on standards supported by IE Mobile - a subject concerning which the IE8 blog is (so far) completely silent.

IE Mobile; not forgotten; just of no interest to the mainstream. Odd, that...