Microsoft intends to ship Internet Explorer 7 with Windows Phone 7

Today Microsoft released the SDK for Windows Phone 7. It includes an emulator with a build of Internet Explorer. The useragent reported by the emulator is Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 7.0; Windows Phone OS 7.0; Trident/3.1; IEMobile/7.0). I’ve also ran the CSS selector test and the HTML5 test and both report the same numbers as the desktop version of IE7.

Unfortunately still no modern browser for Windows Phone 7 users, but at least it’s a big improvement over Windows Mobile 6.5 which shipped with Internet Explorer 6. Even though they could make a switch to a more modern engine like Webkit, I can understand their reluctance to use an externally developed engine. Still I’m quite curious why they didn’t ship their own standards compliant engine: the one used in Internet Explorer 8.  Anything less seems to indicate to me that phones are still a second class citizen within Microsoft itself.

Tuesday, 16 March 2010