Microbrowsers

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A microbrowser is a web browser designed for use on a mobile handheld device such as a PDA or smartphone. Essentially, they are a miniaturized version of desktop browsers such as Netscape Navigators or Internet Explorers. Microbrowsers are different from the traditional desktop browsers in the following features:

• Optimized to display Internet content effectively for small screens on handheld devices.
• Small footprints to accommodate low memory capacity of handheld devices.
• Less functions because of limited computing power of handheld devices.
• Less multimedia features due to low-bandwidth of wireless transmission.

Microbrowsers usually set up the cellular networks themselves and get content written in

• XHTML Mobile Profile: WAP 2.0 specifies XHTML Mobile Profile plus WAP CSS, subsets of the W3C's standard XHTML (Extensible HTML) and CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) with mobile extensions.


• WML: WAP 1.3 specifies WML based on HDML (Handheld Device Markup Language). WML and HDML are stripped-down formats suitable for transmission across limited bandwidth and wireless data connection.


• Compact HTML: In Japan, DoCoMo defined the i-mode service based on i-mode HTML, which is an extension of Compact HTML (C-HTML), a simple subset of HTML.

Smartphone or PDA emulators let you browse and test mobile content from your desktop or notebook computer. Unlike with a simulation, an emulation does not attempt to precisely model the state of the device being emulated; it only attempts to reproduce its behavior. Two emulators, TagTag and WinWAP, are recommended for mobile content development.