Mobile browser

Mobile browsers are optimized to display web content most effectively on small screens on portable devices.

The mobile browser usually connects via the cellular network, or increasingly via Wireless LAN, using standard HTTP over TCP/IP and displays web pages written in HTML.

WML and HDML are stripped-down formats suitable for transmission across limited bandwidth, and wireless data connection called WAP.

The first mobile browser for a PDA was PocketWeb[1][2] for the Apple Newton created at TecO in 1994, followed by the first commercial product NetHopper released in August 1996.

[4][5] A British company, STNC Ltd., developed a mobile browser (HitchHiker) in 1997 that was intended to present the entire device UI.

HitchHiker is believed to be the first mobile browser with a unified rendering model, handling HTML and WAP along with ECMAScript, WMLScript, POP3 and IMAP mail in a single client.

A freeware (although later shareware) browser for the Palm OS was Palmscape, written in 1998 by Kazuho Oku in Japan, who went on to found Ilinx.

ProxiWeb[9] was a proxy-based Web browsing solution, developed by Ian Goldberg and others[10] at the University of California, Berkeley and later acquired by PumaTech.

Distinct from a mobile browser is a web-based emulator, which uses a "Virtual Handset" to display WAP pages on a computer screen, implemented either in Java or as an HTML transcoder.