Written by Brandon on Thursday, March 8, 2007

Quick Look: jB5 – The Mobile Web Browser you’ve never heard of…

What is it?

jB5 is a web browser (beta) that frankly I’d never heard of before until I saw a post on msmobiles.com the other day. The big difference is this one isn’t trying to be a mobile browser in the typical sense. This browser wants to bring the real web to your mobile, not just a horribly crippled version of the web like PIE brings.

Cost:

Nada. Zip. Zilch. – Ok, Ok … it will cost you a registration to the website (5 seconds) and the time to download. For you math wizards, that’s ZERO dollars.

Read on for more… and some screenies!

Features:

Adaptive Rendering Technology – ART ®
Bookmarks, History, Cookies, BLAH BLAH BLAH
Multiple text sizing options (2 Mobile Versions and Desktop Mode)
Multiple formatting options (Smallest to Largest)
A pretty large list of standards (XHTML, HTML, OMA, CLS … Yada Yada)
Support for Symbian Series 60 and Windows Mobile 5 Smartphone

How I see it:

I’ve been using this browser for about 12 hours and I can tell you so far it puts everything Microsoft has done with PIE to shame. Rendering of websites is cleaner, faster and less "crippled" than a lot of what PIE can do. I liken it to what Opera would be capable of if the released a version for WM5 smartphones. There’s a lot of things I could say with the screenshots below, but I’ll wait until I’m looking at a non-beta product. Frankly, so far I’m excited about this one.

The only problem I’ve seen so far is there’s no SSL support in the build that’s out right now, so don’t plan on using gMail, bank sites, or anything else that runs SSL. I would imagine that’s coming soon, but I’ve got an email into to support so I’ll let you know what I find out. The program has yet to fail, has rendered most sites well … and if you have a problem with a website rendering in one mode, you’ve got two more modes to try!!! Heck of job for being just a beta!