Microsoft’s Pocket Internet Explorer is based on Internet Explorer 4 (which is more than 6 years old and completely outdated). IE6 is not exactly cutting-edge either, but still has a respectable market share: this has animated Microsoft’s Windows Mobile team to integrate it into the next release of their OS.
The screenshot below hits us via the-unwired; the web site claims to have it from Microsoft’s Andy Lees, who is the senior vice president of the mobile computing segment of the Redmond-based behemoth:
Unwired have posted a good set of screenshots as they were provided by Andy Lees – unfortunately, I think that they are looking at mock-ups rather than real screenshots. I will look at the technical reasons in a jiffy: in the mean time, lets analyze why it is unlikely that Andy Lees uses prototype software.
Dogfooding is very common at Microsoft’s – however, it usually is limited to people inside a specific team and doesn’t affect other teams. Seeing that Andy is a manager rather than a developer, I have to question the value that he presents to a beta testing team.
While the look of the scroll bars could also be caused by Windows CE (Windows CE scroll bars look like Win95 ones), the scrollbars in PocketPC programs come in 2D only. As the rest of the program clearly uses PocketPC widgets, there is little reason for this UI mixup.
Finally: the screenshots come in VGA resolution, which was very popular in the times of IE6 (many Windows 95 boxen support VGA only). If Microsoft would want to show off its amazing rendering engine, why should they do it on VGA and not on QVGA (where achieving good rendering is much more difficult)?
Don’t get me wrong: IE6 for WM is coming (one day). In fact, it is very likely that a Windows Mobile developer will read these lines using an internal beta of it. Unfortunately, the screenshots were deemed unfit for some reason or another – which is why mock-ups were created in order to keep the rumor mill in check.
What do you think?
Related posts:
