Menneisyys

We've been waiting for over a year for an updated version of PIEPlus, one of the most important Pocket Internet Explorer (PIE for short) plug-ins. It's, now, here, with some welcome additions – and, a new bug and still lacking WM5 compatibility.

Changes

• * Now, just like in MultiIE, the tab height is configurable (as opposed to previous versions) – the lack of this was one of the biggest annoyances with the previous version.
  
  * The "Close button" and the "Screen drag button", however, are gone from both the General tab dialog (compare the two screenshots above) and the right end of the tab row. A screenshot of the tabs is here (1.31) and here (1.2b2)
  
  * Strangely, the "Language – Default character set" drop-down list is no longer available in the PIE tab (version 1.2 screenshot is here).
  
  * There's a new main context menu menu item, Tab bar, to quickly hide/unhide the tabs. It wasn't present in the latest beta. The other (link/image) context menus have not been changed.
  

Please note that the <new> features in the "Feature List" section on the official homepage does not compare the new, 1.31 version to the two, publicly available, one-year-old betas but to the old, official, non-beta version 1.1. This means Tabbed multiple PIE windows, Screen drag to scroll, View HTML source and Save image (the four "new" features) have all been existing in the previous betas and are nothing new; they are only additions compared to version 1.1.


Cons, bugs

• * sometimes, the toolbar just disappears, as can be seen for example in this screenshot. In here, the standard Today toolbar is displayed instead of the standard PIE + PIEPlus one. This seems to be an acute problem as you can't bring it back without shutting down (minimizing won't suffice!) PIE.
  
  
  * no WM5 support. Absolutely none. Do not attempt installing it on a WM5 device if you don't want to run into severe system slowdowns and other problems (fortunately, a simple uninstall will get rid of these problems). Unfortunately, right now, only ftxPBrowser is compatible with WM5 devices (to some degree), as far as Pocket Internet Explorer/ Internet Explorer Mobile plug-ins/add-ons are concerned. The current version, 3.1-d59, of MultiIE, the other PIE plug-in, isn't WM5-compliant either.
  

Please note that

• * In PIEPLus, the "Pocket View" mode is enabled by default, which will render tables quite differently than the One Column view mode of WM2003SE devices. The former displays all cells in a table row one after another, without inserting newlines in between them; the latter does insert newlines. In my opinion, the latter approach is much better in most cases - it separates the contents of distinct columns far better.
  
  PIEPlus puts all concetanated rows in a real table row; the One Column mode of PIE doesn't. The former approach is definitely better because, at least, it shows the row boundaries.
  
  Therefore, if you have a WM2003SE device, you will want to consider which of the two approaches you prefer and accordingly set your settings (either enabled "Pocket View" and the browser in Standard View mode, or disabled "Pocket View" and the browser in One Column mode).
  
  
  * Never ever install PIEPlus and MultiIE on the same device at the same time, both enabled, if you want to avoid some serious boot-time problems! (Of course, this was true of previous versions too.)
  

Differences, compared to MultiIE

In addition to the Roundup of Web Browsers (see the link in the "Recommended reading" section) comparison, I've also directly compared the two plug-ins as follows:

I've also tested the known problem of MultiIE: if you use word completion with the built-in Software Keyboard and select a word to complete, the tab underneath (if a tab is under the clicked word) will be activated at once. For example, in this screenshot, the first tab would activate if you used MultiIE and clicked the word "today" where the mouse cursor is. The new version PIEPlus doesn't suffer from this problem.

Verdict

If you haven't used the 1.2 betas in the last year but used the even older, non-beta version 1.1, you will indeed welcome the changes. If you did use the betas, you won't find much in the new version – except for the fine-tunable tab height, which is indeed welcome.

If you've paid for previous versions of PIEPlus, get this version – it'll be free for you. However, look out for the 'disappearing toolbar' bug – I don't know if you'll be facing it or not.

Other users may also want to give the new PIEPlus a try – it has a trial version. Whether it's worth the money – I don't know. If you want to stick with PIE, compare it to MultiIE and ftxPBrowser and decide which one to get.

Alternatively, you may want to abandon PIE completely and switch to an alternative browser – particularly on Windows Mobile 5, which has a wonderful Opera port.

Recommended reading

Roundup of Web Browsers (alternatives: iPAQ HQ, AximSite, FirstLoox, PPC Magazine, BrightHand). Please also make sure you follow the links in the threads to the newer articles too.

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MS MVP- Mobile Devices.