With yesterday’s release of Opera Mini 4 Beta, I thought it would be a good time to do a browser comparison to show what the options are in the world of mobile browsing. I’ll review a standard WAP browser (as found on the vast majority of cellphones), the S60 browser (found on recent Nokia smartphones), Opera Mini 3 (used by over 15 millions people on any Java cellphone), Opera Mini 4 Beta (just released), Pocket IE (found on Windows Mobile smartphones) and the iPhone (although no hands on testing can be done yet). First let’s see which criteria can differentiate the browsers.

Criteria

The look

The first and most visual feature in comparing browsers, is how the pages look. There are 2 typical presentation styles: phone view and desktop view.

Phone view is the typical view a WAP browser gives you. Basically it takes the HTML and other web input, and formats them to fit the screen. This means that the page isn’t shown in the way it was intended to be, it can be painful to scroll through, and some elements may not appear at all. However the data transfer is less since there is only a minimum amount of images, and the power required is less so rendering may be faster.

Desktop view is what newer browsers are starting to adopt, and instead render the page as it would appear on a desktop browser, and then provide 4 way scrolling, as well as a rectangle where the user can focus and zoom in/out to read a section of the page. This can be done in 2 ways, either the screen shows the zoomed in view, with a mini map showing the full page (the S60 browser does this), or the screen shows the full page, with a mini map allowing for zooming (the new Opera Mini 4 Beta does that).

To illustrate these features, here are shots of the same 3 web pages (Yahoo!, The New York Times and Digg) on a WAP browser, the S60 browser, and Opera Mini 4 Beta.

Features

The other obvious point to compare with these browsers is the features they support. This includes everything from web standards, JavaScript, AJAX, bookmarks, but also extra features like RSS feeds.

Also worth noting is if the browser is in beta or not, as it may contain bugs or stability issues. A crashing browser is not a pleasant web experience.

Availability

Finally of importance is also the availability of the browser: whether it comes pre-installed on handsets, if it’s available for download, and if it costs anything. It’s also worth noting which programming language the browser is written in, since different devices support different languages.

The browsers

WAP

The first in the list is the standard WAP browser. This is the browser that comes pre-installed on the vast majority of phones, and also the least powerful of the bunch. Some popular ones include NetFront, Openwave and PocketWeb. It’s the oldest type of browser and still the most used today on low end phones around the world.

These are usually part of the firmware of the phone and comes with handsets, and they provide a phone based look of the web. The early WAP browser only supported WAP pages, special sites ending with the extension “.wap” and not normal Internet sites. Modern WAP browsers also support basic HTML sites, and remove everything except text and sometimes images.

As far as features, they usually provide bookmarking, and that’s about it. Very rarely will they support even basic JavaScript and secure transactions, and you can forget any Web2.0 sites.

Pocket IE

The second browser is Pocket IE (also called Mobile Internet Explorer), the Microsoft browser that comes with Pocket PC and Windows Mobile smartphones. This browser is made by Microsoft and has been through several versions already.

It provides a view of the web similar to the WAP browser, meaning it will take web pages and display them to fit the phone screen, instead of showing them as they were intended. It does display all the proper images, but they are smaller and not in their original locations. It’s worth noting that Microsoft currently has a new engine called Deepfish in development which will convert Pocket IE to display pages in the desktop view.

For features, PocketIE is much better than a WAP browser. On top of bookmarking and normal text and images, it supports the full set of web protocols like HTML, JavaScript, secure transactions and AJAX.

S60 browser

The S60 browser is an open source project from Nokia that uses the khtml engine and was introduced in the spring of 2006. It’s available pre-installed on all S60 smartphones since early 2006.

This is the first browser to provide a desktop like web experience on mobile devices. It provides a zoomed in version of the page, and allows users to scroll in all 4 directions with the joystick or keys. When scrolling, a mini map appears showing all the pages. It also provides a back feature which shows every page in a scrolling list. For devices that support landscape mode, the latest version also supports it.

The S60 browser supports all the web protocols as well, plus RSS feeds in a special Feeds folder.

Opera Mini

Opera Mini is the popular Java browser that runs on almost any phone which supports Java. It comes pre-installed on a few phones, but it’s also available for free download. The latest stable version is 3.1, but the beta version 4 was released recently.

The original look of Opera Mini was the same as WAP or PocketIE, meaning that web sites would be displayed to fit the phone. In version 4, this is changed to display pages in desktop view. Note that as of yet it does not support landscape mode.

Opera Mini supports all the web features, including RSS feeds. Note however that some features such as RSS and secure transactions are not available yet in version 4 beta.

iPhone

The iPhone will come with a version of Safari. This browser is based on khtml, the same as the S60 browser. It’s not yet available, so the only things we know is what Apple has said. We do know it will be exclusive to the iPhone.

The display will be like the S60 browser and Opera Mini 4, showing a desktop based view. It also supports landscape mode, and provides a zooming feature. Apple also said that iPhone applications will be built around Safari.

We should also expect similar features as what the S60 browser provides, since it uses the same engine.

Conclusion

Obviously, if you intend to do a lot of browsing with your mobile device, the browser is an important part of the buying decision. That’s where smartphones such as S60 devices come in handy. If your device comes only with a WAP browser, but you can install additional Java applets, the latest Opera Mini seems like a clear choice. It’s currently the best free browser that can be downloaded.

As far as look, it seems clear that the future is headed to web style browsing, with the S60 browser, Opera Mini 4, Microsoft Deepfish and the iPhone all heading that way. In a year’s time, everyone will be expecting this type of full web support on the road, as it should be.

Last year Google introduced a web based word processor. Then, they added a spreadsheet and called the package Google Docs. Today, they announced that they bought a presentation service to add presentations to Google Docs. The biggest issue with this, and any of the multitude of web services that Google has been introducing over the years, is the fact that since both the applications and your data are online, you always need to be connected to make use of them. Many media sources dismissed them as useless.

Yet recently a little product got introduced under the radar to the developers community by Google called Google Gears, and I believe this is the tipping point where everything culminates to. It allows any online service to be cached locally, used offline, and then synchronized when a connection becomes available. Suddenly, all those web based applications become available at all times. And that implies a lot of cool things.

First, as web services get improved, all users have access to the latest version instantly, for free. That’s a major bonus since you no longer have the need to push security updates to people, and software no longer compromises the stability or speed of the local desktop since it’s all running on the remote server.

Second, and perhaps most important, since it all uses open web standards, it’s not restricted to a platform. While a word processor, presentation application or feed reader would typically need to be developed for every operating system you want to run it on, it’s all available on the web and every computer or device with a full web browser can access it online. Then, all you have to do is port Google Gears, and instantly all the web services become available on that platform offline too.

It doesn’t take much to envision what plans Google may have. They have always been active in the mobile space, so we can easily see all their web resources becoming available on mobile platforms. They are working closely with Apple so it may appear first on the iPhone, but Google always went for open standards in the past so they would introduce it to all mobile devices. This is also why things like Opera Mini 4, which provides the full web to any Java cellphone, is so important.

Just think what the future may look like. You go on your Apple desktop in the morning, access your text documents, presentations, read your news, watch your online photos and reply to your email. Then on the road during your commute you get your Windows Mobile smartphone and instantly have access to all of the same data and can work on it with an interface customized for the smaller screen. And once at work, you log on your Linux work computer, and your data is right there, waiting for you. No syncing needed, no need to transfer or convert documents around, everything always available regardless of the platform you use.

The future is truly web centric, and in that kind of future, what becomes important is the web services and web browser, and not which operating system you use, what desktop application you need to buy or which file formats you need to convert.