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
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.
