Mobile browsers

This page gives details about all browsers for smartphone OSs I discovered so far. For more information see the mobile market overview.

Full browsers

Browsers are split up into full and thin, and are ranked according to overall quality.

If you know of any download location or documentation for one of the browsers which lacks that information, please let me know.

The following browsers run fully on the client device, with all possible problems due to memory that may bring.

Safari

Downloadable
No; firmware
Documentation
Yes
Versions
Follow iPhone OS version numbers
iPhone users are pretty decent at upgrading their phones to the latest firmwares, so you generally have to test in the latest version only.
Notes
Apple set out to make the best mobile browser in the world, and it has basically succeeded. Most other mobile browser vendors woke up and started to run, too. That’s good.
Basically does not have caching. This is a trade-off, but it will still cause problems. A platform that claims to be the best for web surfing must have decent cache; period.
Fairly slow when it comes to JavaScript. Use CSS animations and transitions instead.
Distinctly behind in zooming: all elements retain their fixed values, while most competitors adapt the width of text elements to the current zoom level. Thus, very long lines of text are hard to read on Safari.

Android WebKit

Downloadable
No; firmware
Documentation
Haven’t found it yet
Versions
Between Android 1.6 and 2.0 a major update took place.
Thorough Android testing requires both an 1.x and a 2.x device.
Notes
Sometimes a bit jittery.

Dolfin

Downloadable
No; firmware
Documentation
Some
Notes
Some bugs here and there, especially in the viewport properties. It’s not quite up to iPhone/Android level, but Samsung is clearly trying very hard.
Fast.

BlackBerry WebKit

Downloadable
No; firmware
Documentation
Yes
Versions
Default browser of BlackBerry OS 6 and higher.
Maybe a tad slow.

Opera Mobile

Downloadable
Yes
Documentation
Yes; general Opera documentation; some info about Mobile.
Versions
Opera follows its desktop version numbers closely, bless their hearts. The latest mobile release is 10. In general Opera Mobile is one step behind Opera desktop.
The firmware version on UIQ seems to have stalled at 8.65 (a version number that does not occur on desktop).
The Opera runtime in the Vodafone widget manager is slightly different from a regular Opera Mobile, especially where it comes to events. Still, you’ll encounter few major incompatibilities.
In general the Opera widget manager runtime is slightly behind the latest Opera Mobile release.
Notes
Opera Mobile 10.10 on Android supports pinch zooming and the touch events.
See this blog post for a summary of Opera’s problems on mobile.
Also, Opera is currently trying to supersede the native system interface with its own, and I, for one, hate that (which does not necessarily mean the average user will hate it). Symbian and BlackBerry each have their own standard interface for hardware buttons, and Opera messes it up. That confuses my reflexes; on a BlackBerry the BlackBerry button should bring up the main application menu. Platform convention. Period.

Palm WebKit

Downloadable
No; firmware
Documentation
Haven’t found it yet
Versions
Concurrent with webOS versions.
Notes
I don’t own a working webOS device, so I don’t test this browser.

MicroB

Downloadable
Yes, but only for the Nokia N800.
Documentation
Haven’t found it yet
Notes
Maemo, now called MeeGo after its merger with MobLin (Mobile Linux), runs only on the Nokia N900.
Once the first true MeeGo device appears, will it continue to use MicroB? Or will it switch to WebKit?

Phantom

Downloadable
No; firmware
Documentation
Haven’t found it yet
Notes
Phantom is a mixed bag. On the one hand it supports advanced features, on the other there are problems with relatively simple stuff like rendering the page correctly (not that it makes CSS mistakes, but parts of the page sometimes don’t show up).
Bugs in meta viewport. If I define any viewport width between 320 and 480 it switches to 480. Or to 744 (sometimes). Above 480 the meta viewport width seems to be taken seriously.
I can’t decide whether this is a good browser with some bad features or a bad browser with some good features.

Nokia WebKit

Downloadable
No; firmware
Documentation
Yes
Versions
See this Forum Nokia page for a formal list.
I have decided on the following version system. It needs some tweaking (feature packs don’t officially correlate with browser versions) but it’ll do for now.:
  1. Version 1 runs on S40 and S60v3 feature pack 1. It is not suited for touchscreens. This is the “S60v3” browser in many of the older compatiblity tables.
  2. Version 2 runs on S60v3 feature pack 2, as well as on S60v5 touchscreens and Symbian^3. The touch and mouse events are quite different on touchscreens and non-touchscreens, but otherwise it’s pretty much the same.
There was in fact an older version of Symbian WebKit that ran on very old S60 devices such as the E61. I have made a faint attempt to start up an E61 to test it, but when it didn’t respond I decided to forget about it.
Besides, not giving this version a number means that my Symbian WebKit version numbers will start to run in sync with Nokia’s Symbian version numbers pretty soon.
Notes
Stephanie Rieger has written a great series of articles about this browser that’s chock-full of stuff you need to know.
Symbian WebKit is the mobile browser with the highest installed base in the world. (It may even trump IE as the most-installed browser in the world.)
Installed base does not equal usage, though, and that might partly be because the interface is not always brilliant (with the exception of the Back functionality, which should be copied by all other mobile browsers).
Caching is extremely aggressive; you always have to flush the cache before reloading your test pages. And yes, this gets extremely annoying after a while.
CSS is good from version 2 onwards. The main problem lies in JavaScript performance. I assume Nokia is working on this, and version 3 will be significantly improved.
And if not, there’s always Opera.

Firefox

Downloadable
Yes
Documentation
Yes
Versions
Beta for Android(?) coming up. There’s some confusion over whether it’s called Firefox or Fennec. I’m currently guessing the former.
Notes
Right now Firefox is irrelevant on mobile. Mozilla has a lot of work to do.

BlackBerry old

Downloadable
No; firmware
Documentation
Removed in favour of BlackBerry WebKit; see however this overview of which version supports what.
Versions
Default browser of BlackBerry OS 5 and lower.
Notes
CSS is good from version 2 onwards. The main problem lies in JavaScript performance, which is pretty much absent.

IE Mobile

Downloadable
No; firmware
Documentation
Haven’t found it yet; there’s a blog, though.
Versions
IE on Windows Mobile 6.5 is based on IE6 and calls itself IE6. IE on Windows Mobile 6.1 is based on IE4 and also calls itself IE6. I don’t yet know what IE on Windows Phone will call itself. IE on Windows Mobile 6.5 already calls itself Windows Phone.
You still follow?
Notes
Yes, this is IE6 reborn, but we already know how to work around it.
Microsoft has just one more shot at the mobile market. Windows Phone will just have to get it all right, or the Redmond Giant is out of the mobile race.
The initial browser for Windows Phone 7 will be IE7-based. However, I more-or-less expect Microsoft to move to IE9.

NetFront

Downloadable
Yes
Documentation
Haven’t found it yet; but here’s the homepage.
Versions
I test the 4 beta. All lower versions are embedded as firmware on Samsung and SonyEricsson phones.
Notes
NetFront is optimised to run in a very low-memory environment, and therefore deliberately lacks some features. Unless Access performs a major upgrade on top of the version 4, NetFront will eventually become a feature phone browser. Not that that’s bad, but it means different support priorities.
Used to be the default browser for mid-range SonyEricsson devices.

Obigo old

Downloadable
No; firmware
Documentation
Haven’t found it yet; but here’s the homepage.
Versions
Currently at 7.3; most modern Obigo-carrying phones use a 7.x version.
The WebKit-based one is version 10.
As far as I know versions 8 and 9 do not exist.
Notes
Will mostly become a feature phone browser. However, this newsitem from February shows an LG phone with Obigo that is rumoured to run MeeGo (Maemo + MobLin), which I formally classify as a smartphone OS. Thus, Obigo may unfortunately get a smartphone presence.
LG’s browser of choice.
Between version 7 and 10 Obigo switched from its own rendering engine to WebKit.

Mini browsers

These browsers do the actual rendering on a server, compress the result, and send it on to a thin client that displays it on the device. Thus these browsers need little memory to run in, and significantly reduce over-the-air traffic, making them very suited to be run on low-powered devices when mobile connectivity is bad or expensive or both.

The trade-off is that they don’t support client-side interactivity: when JavaScript is executed the thin client has to get back to the server to get instructions.

Opera Mini

Downloadable
Yes.
Documentation
Maybe; general Opera documentation; haven’t found Mini-specific stuff yet.
Version
Currently at 5, although I suspect the installed base of 4 is quite large.

Bolt

Downloadable
Yes.
Documentation
Haven’t found it yet; but here’s the homepage.
Version
1.7; 2.11 available, but I can’t get it installed on my E71.
Notes
Supports W3C Widgets; I haven’t yet tested this personally.
Supports Flash

Ovi

Downloadable
Yes.
Documentation
Haven’t found it yet.
Notes
I don’t have this browser available.

UCWeb

Downloadable
Yes. The site is hell to navigate on a mobile phone, though.
Documentation
Haven’t found it yet; but here’s the homepage.
Version
7.2
Notes
The most popular browser in China.
If you test it on the iPhone, be sure to set the “Browse Mode” preference to “Adaptive.” If you select “Zoom mode” it uses Safari instead.