REVIEW: Pocket Internet Explorer plug-in MultiIE 4.0
After a long pause of two years, the new, 4.0 version MultiIE, one of the best Pocket Internet Explorer (Internet Explorer Mobile) enhancers has been released. I’ve already reported on it
here; now, let’s see how it compares to the previous versions, the alternate browsers and the competing products!
1. Changes / news
1.1 Options menu (Menu / MultiIE / Options / Options)
1.1.1 General tab (old / new)
It’s generally the same as with the previous version (where it was still called
Page), with the difference that it no longer uses buttons to set the default contents of the new tab and the tab settings (the bottom-most group in previous versions) have been relocated to the new ‘
Tab’ tab. (Also note that the application erroneously uses ‘
MIE’ to refer to IEM.)
1.1.2 Screen tab (old / new)
The first, “
Show quick toggle…” checkbox in the Full screen group has been moved to the single checkbox in the new “
Quick corner buttons” group at the bottom. The
Menu bar hiding option has been entirely left out and, as hiding the address bar isn’t configurable any more in MultiIE (as opposed to PIEPlus 2.0+, of which the review
can be found here and is
highly recommended so that you know even more about the differences between the two plug-ins), the address bar-related checkbox too.
A welcome addition, however, is the landscape rotation drop-down list; with that,
you can tell MultiIE what your preferred landscape orientation is (not present in PIEPlus).
1.1.3 Tab tab
This is a brand new tab incorporating the tab settings from the old Page tab – greatly enhanced. While the old versions only allowed for settting the height of the tabs and their width, now, you can individually configure the tab height for portrait and landscape orientation (see
the new “Adjust settings for … screen” drop-down list ). This is a definite advantage over even PIEPlus 2.1b2, which
doesn’t support defining separate heights/widths for the two screen orientations.
Also, it lets you set the position of the new tab (see the “
Open new window” group). This is a welcome addition (which PIEPlus 2.0+
also supports).
1.1.4 Button(s) (old / new)
Almost the entire old contents of this tab has been moved under the new,
Set Buttons button (except for the “
Direction pad scrolls by…” drop-down list and a lot of new, welcome setting widgets have been added. Most important of them is the support for fine-tuning the scrolling amount in both page and line scrolling mode (see the “
Line / Page scroll by … %” fields) and the support for WM5 soft key buttons (see the bottom-most group), which work flawlessly on my test devices (of course, as toggling between the scrolling mode doesn’t work with the current build/version, I could only test the full screen toggling.)
PIEPlus 2.1b2, on the other hand, doesn’t allow for utilizing WM5 softkeys as can be seen for example in
this HTC Wizard (the Wizard has dedicated softkeys – still, they are not even listed in here) screenshot. This is a definite advantage of MultiIE4 over PIEPlus.
Note that PIEPlus 2.1b2
only lets for fine-tuning the line scrolling amount, not the page scrolling (see the topmost drop-down list). In this respect, MultiIE is also better.
Up until now, it was only NetFront that has allowed for fine-tuning the scrolling amount. Nice to see both PIEPlus and MultiIE changing the situation!
1.1.5 Plugin tab
This tab has most of the
‘Misc’ tab and the
'Preset' tab of the old version.
The new MultiIE version boasts a lot of macroing-related additions. (To understand how the old macros can be used, please read my one-year-old
Bible of Web Browsers (alternates:
MobilitySite,
AximSite,
FirstLoox,
PPC Magazine,
BrightHand).)
The drop-down list and the connected editable field of the old “
Address bar macros” group, now,
have all been delegated to behind the button in the “
Address bar search” group. Using this dialog is pretty straightforward and will be easy to anyone that understands how macros can be created and used. Therefore, I won’t elaborate on it here more – please do read the MultiIE macroing-related section in the above-linked
Bible of Web Browsers.
The drop-down menu has been substantially changed (
old version here); now, it’s even more logical and easier-to-grasp.
Incidentally, it’s also here in the “
Menu contents” dialog, in the
Location-Based Services group, that you can
define the GPS port if you want to make use location-based services. The latter are a really great addition in the new version, unknown and unprecedented in any else application (including PIEPlus 2.1b2).
The
Preset tab of the old version is moved to behind the “
Configure” button in the “
Presets” group. It is exactly the
same as with the old version but it lacks the “
Preset options” checkboxes.
The “
Menu extensions” group in the old
Misc tab have also been greatly enhanced. Now, you can configure the way of invoking external applications
much more thoroughly than
in the previous version.
Finally,
the “Pocket IE” button in the “
Registry setting tweaks” has also been changed a lot (
the menu behind the “Network” button is the same). Now, as opposed to
the previous versions, where it was here that you could change the User-Agent information (with three presets) and you could en/disable ClearType; now, you only have access to en/disabling JavaScript errors and warnings.
Of course, this doesn’t mean you can’t change the User-Agent MultiIE sends to Web servers to pretend it’s a desktop Internet Explorer browser – this option
has been moved to the main menu, to
MultiIE / Page Tools / Set User Agent and the
generic page context menu (Page Tools / Set User Agent). Unfortunately, there are only two choices and you can’t supply a user-defined one, as opposed to PIEPlus 2.1b2.
1.2 Context menus
1.2.1 Generic page (non-image/link context) menu (old / new)
As can be seen, the generic page context menu has been redesigned. The
Address Bar boolean item has been removed (as has already been pointed out, it’s not possible to hide the address bar in non-fullscreen mode, as opposed to PIEPlus);
Screen Drag has been moved to Menu / MultiIE / Options / Screen Drag;
Window Tabs (the quick way to display/hide the tab bar)
has been moved to Menu / MultiIE / Options / Show Tabs and
so has been Keep Backlight On.
The
Full screen menu option, which is also accessible via the triangle icon at the bottom right, has been moved upwards and a new menu item,
Rotate Screen (this menu item, naturally, is missing on WM2003 devices) has been added. The
Scroll submenu
no longer allows for Page Up/Down.
A brand new submenu,
Page Tools,
can also be found here; it’s here that you can view the source of a Web page (
View Source), save it (
Save Web Page As…), set the User-Agent (
Set User-Agent) and, finally,
use your predefined Send To macros.
1.2.2 Link context menu (old / new)
The “
Default Open Action” submenu and
Copy/View Link Address have all been relocated to
the newly added Link Tools menu, along with the
Send To menu, which is the same as with the page sending case (here, it lists the predefined link sending options). This means only the really most important and most widely used “
Open” menu items have remained here – this is definitely good news.
1.2.3 Image context menu (old / new)
It hasn’t changed much – it still allows for saving images. It, however, no longer allows for setting a given image as a Today wallpaper. This is definitely good because the implementation of this was certainly flaky in the previous version (see the Bible of Web browsers for a more thorough explanation.) It no longer allows to view the image text either.
2. Bugs
Unfortunately, this application seems to be a rushed-to-the-market one and doesn’t seem to be ready for prime time. It has several bugs that make it really hard to use and, in cases, plain useless.
First, the biggest problem is the flaky support for more than, in general, two tabs. No matter what settings you use, only two to five tabs will be displayed (on
my iPAQ 2210, some 5 tabs were the maximum I could list at a time; on my PL720, some 2-3 tabs and on the x51v, the HTC Wizard and the hx4700, 2 tabs at most). MultiIE just keeps opening the newly chosen link in the last used tab (with devices that only allow for two tabs, the non-active one).
Second, albeit, in theory, MultiIE 4 allows for overriding the default “line” scrolling behaviour of IEM, this doesn’t work. Neither the scrolling shortcut icon (the one at the bottom left corner) nor "
Direction pad scrolls by"
in the Button tab of Options work. If you change the value of
[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\ Software\ Microsoft\Internet Explorer\ Navigation\4-Way Nav] from 1 to
0 as is explained in my article
Windows Mobile 5: How do I modify the default scrolling behaviour of Web browsers?, you can scroll Web pages a page at a time, but that solution is clearly inferior to a much easier-to-change one.
This is a big problem! Unfortunately, these bugs render this otherwise excellent plug-in very hard to use – at least in my opinion (I prefer keeping open and using as many tabs as possible because, when I load a page in a tab or several other tabs, I can browse a Web page in another. Also, I would like to switch between different scrolling modes a lot, depending on whether I use the touchscreen to click links or I prefer one-hand operation.)
3. Button assignment
As has been pointed out in the PIEPlus 2.0 review, PIEPlus 2.0 has much better hardware button assignment support than the 1.x series. With MultiIE, on the other hand, the changes are negative – that is, some of the functionality still present in the previous (3.1) version has been removed. For example,
‘Show/hide address bar’, ‘Window List menu’, ‘Open new window’, ‘Open URL’, ‘Keypress TAB’ are all gone. Most of them aren’t that important; except for, maybe,
Show/hide address bar. Much as this feature has been removed from the underlying IEM under WM5
as can be seen in this screenshot,
PIEPlus 2.0 does implement it (even
assignable to a hardware button – not only
in the View menu) and it
does work.
Special (hold-down) buttons have been recognized by MultiIE correctly on all my test devices, as opposed to the previous MultiIE version. (Screenshot
1 and
2 of the previous version.)
(Screenshots showing the two function lists so that you can also compare them:
old version:
here,
here,
here and
here
new version:
here,
here and the standard IE functions
here)
4. Problems with WM2003(SE)
MultiIE 4, officially, is WM5-compliant only. However, you can run it on WM20003 and WM20003SE devices too if you are ready to live with the following limitations/problems:
- some Web pages aren’t fully downloaded (for example, in the Pocket PC Mag Expert Blog (screenshot); this bug comes up pretty stochastically
- lack of the quick on-screen corner buttons (the scroll mode and the full screen icons) at the bottom
- the address is likely to shift down upon every resource load and/or URL entering on WM2003SE VGA devices; it only returns to its original position if you switch between different tabs (example screenshot)
- the SIP icon isn’t displayed at the bottom right (PL720; 2210). As can be seen in the latter screenshot, however, when a text input field has the focus, the last active SIP is activated – that is, it’s possible to enter text, it’s just not possible to change SIP’s.
- Options/ Options/ Button doesn’t display anything (2210 screenshot; PL720 screenshot), while it’s working great on all WM5 devices – hx4700, x51v.
5. Verdict
This plug-in is excellent, feature-wise and beats PIEPlus 2.1 in many respects (while, in some respects, PIEPlus 2.1 is certainly better). The bugs which, again, are present on all my three freshly hard reset WM5 test devices (WM5 iPAQ hx4700, Dell Axim x51v A12, HTC Wizard with the latest AKU2 i-mate ROM), however, render it almost useless.
This means you may want to wait for the version with the bugs fixed to arrive before completely switching to using MultiIE 4.
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