A port of desktop IE to Windows CE is nothing new. There have been ports of desktop IE to Windows CE since CE version 2.12 in 1999 (IE 4.01) and Internet Explorer 6.0 for Windows CE first started shipping with Windows CE 4.2 back in 2003 along with a few minor updates in CE 5.0 and 6.0. It actually shipped with 3 different OS versions...
I never understood why MS kept hacking at their Pocket IE browser and just did not give up on it years ago and use the desktop based IE CE (with modifications) 3 or more years ago...
The truth is, IE 6.0 could have shipped with the original edition of Pocket PC 2003 if MS wanted it to. Why they never even talked about it in relation to Windows Mobile until now is beyond me. Maybe they thought the hardware was not yet up to par at that point or it could not render for small screens well enough... Who really knows? But in my view, its rather telling that they dropped support for the Pocket IE engine in embedded versions of WinCE completely with version 6.0.
I dunno. This article isn't too clear which desktop version of IE it is they are talking about porting, though. Maybe they are working on porting IE7 afterall... If so, if would be nice to have an update for embedded use and I'd hope they would also make it availabe to their embedded versions of Windows CE in the future if they did port it. (Or maybe it would not be so nice considering how badly it performs on some laptops...)
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A port of desktop IE to Windows CE is nothing new. There have been ports of desktop IE to Windows CE since CE version 2.12 in 1999 (IE 4.01) and Internet Explorer 6.0 for Windows CE first started shipping with Windows CE 4.2 back in 2003 along with a few minor updates in CE 5.0 and 6.0. It actually shipped with 3 different OS versions...
I never understood why MS kept hacking at their Pocket IE browser and just did not give up on it years ago and use the desktop based IE CE (with modifications) 3 or more years ago...
The truth is, IE 6.0 could have shipped with the original edition of Pocket PC 2003 if MS wanted it to. Why they never even talked about it in relation to Windows Mobile until now is beyond me. Maybe they thought the hardware was not yet up to par at that point or it could not render for small screens well enough... Who really knows? But in my view, its rather telling that they dropped support for the Pocket IE engine in embedded versions of WinCE completely with version 6.0.
I dunno. This article isn't too clear which desktop version of IE it is they are talking about porting, though. Maybe they are working on porting IE7 afterall... If so, if would be nice to have an update for embedded use and I'd hope they would also make it availabe to their embedded versions of Windows CE in the future if they did port it. (Or maybe it would not be so nice considering how badly it performs on some laptops...)