Menneisyys

Windows Mobile 5 (WM5 for short) users may have noticed that the default scrolling behaviour of Internet Explorer Mobile (IEM for short) has been modified to make it possible for touchscreen-less (say, Microsoft Smartphone) users to navigate over links. That is, if you press up or down on the D-pad (direction pad) of your Pocket PC, only the next link will be highlighted, not the entire page scrolled. This is diametrically opposed to the approach of earlier operating system versions and can be really frustating for people that would like to scroll one page at a time, without needing to keep track where they were.

In addition to IEM, two of the four (not counting in Opera Mini) alternative Web browsers also suffer from this problem.

It's for them that I've written this step-by-step tutorial discussing all the available Pocket PC Web browsers and the ways of making them scroll one page at a time via the D-pad. Hope they'll find the tutorial useful.

Internet Explorer Mobile

You'll need some registry hacking to switch back to the normal scrolling mode. Get a registry editor (I recommend Resco Registry Editor but you can choose any other, WM5-compliant one; please see this roundup of the available and WM5-compliant registry editors if you want to choose one).

Navigate to [HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\ Software\ Microsoft\Internet Explorer\ Navigation\4-Way Nav] and change its value from 1 to 0 as can be seen in this screnshot.

Alternatively, if you don't want to directly edit the Registry, you can use a third-party application like Tweaks2k2 to do the trick: navigate to Tweaks/Internet Tricks and enable "PIE Smooth Scrolling" as can be seen in this screenshot.

Minimo 0.013rc1

If you plan to use this browser (I, personally, wouldn't – it's very slow on both of my WM5 devices, the x51v and the Wizard. You may have more luck with your particular WM5 Pocket PC, though), click the Main Menu icon in the lower left corner of the screen and click "Enable arrow key scrolling" as can be seen in here.

Opera 8.5beta

Get a file editor tool and edit \Application Data\Opera\input.ini. By changing the

Up = Navigate up
Down = Navigate down

entries to

Up = Page up
Down = Page down

you will achieve exactly what you want.

In addition, if you don't use the default "Fit to screen" mode (Menu/Display/ Fit to screen), you may also want to change

Left = Navigate left
Right = Navigate right

to

Left = Page left
Right = Page right

so that you can easily scroll the page left and right with the D-pad, not only up and down.

I've made available the new input.ini here. If you're afraid of editing the file, just download the file and overwrite the previous \Application Data\Opera\input.ini with it.

Finally, the two browsers that don't require any kind of hacking/resetting:

NetFront 3.3 Technical Preview 1.04

By default, it's in page scroll mode by default – see the Menu/Tools/Browser Setting/Misc/Cursor Key/Mode scroll-down menu.

By clicking the Advanced Setting button in the same tab, you can even set the scroll amount on the next dialog.

Thunderhawk

The recently released WM5 version (albeit the older, non-WM5-specific version 2.1 was also WM5 compatible) of Thunderhawk, fortunately, uses the traditional one-page-at-a-time scrolling behaviour.

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.

__________________
MS MVP- Mobile Devices.

paolofat

Thanks ! I changed the ini file (edited it on my ax using "notes") for Opera; now it scrolls like it should.