Further, when zoomed out, text previously didn’t utilize any subpixel font smoothing, resulting in body size fonts looking like they had a bitmapped appearance when zoomed all the way out. Previously, we noted that this was an aberration resulting from how pages were rendered into a texture, it appears this behavior has been dramatically improved for the better, and as a result text has much more smoothing and quickly changes to proper size when zoomed in on. What’s been interestingly removed is the ability to create a custom tile for an individual page - previously pages could be pinned to the launch screen as tiles.Īnother notable improvement is that text no longer appears extremely jaggy when zooming in quickly. The result is that landscape viewing is now completely supported for more than just viewing pages - previously the URL bar and bottom navigation would disappear in landscape. Landscape view also now keeps the URL bar at the bottom and visible, and one can enter URLs in landscape as well. It's an even more minimalist layout that arguably fits well with the Metro UI "less is more" philosophy. You can see these differences in the first set of screenshots at the top of the page. The result is that there’s now more screen area dedicated to actual browsing, something I think other mobile browser still need to pay attention to. The URL bar has been relocated from the top to the very bottom of the phone, and the three icons that previously were there for favorites, tabs, and the like have been removed. The entire browser application is redesigned. I came away very impressed with how things turned out.īefore we go into standards compliance, let’s talk about UI. It only seems fitting that we test everything and see whether IE 9 on WP7.5 is just as competent as the desktop version.
Trident 5.0 most notably includes SVG, HTML5, CSS 3, and a new JIT compilation accelerated JavaScript engine named Chakra. Trident 5.0 also is the layout engine used in Internet Explorer 9, and it’s a far cry from Trident 3.1 bundled in the original Windows Phone 7. I’ve already referred to Mango as Windows Phone 7.5 a few times, and there’s the reason - it’s right there in the user agent. The user agent on Mango reports itself as “Mozilla/5.0 (compatible MSIE 9.0 Windows NT 6.1 Trident/5.0 XBLWP7 ZuneWP7)” in desktop mode, and “Mozilla/5.0 (compatible MSIE 9.0 Windows Phone OS 7.5 Trident/5.0 IEMobile/9.0 Microsoft XDeviceEmulator)” in mobile mode. Microsoft made a big deal about the browser in Mango being entirely based on Internet Explorer 9. It turns out they weren’t lying.
Left: Windows Phone 7.5 with Trident 5.0 based browser, Right: Windows Phone 7 NoDo with Trident 3.1.
A number of people at XDA are already hard at work unlocking any hidden components in the emulator so we can see everything there is to see inside Mango, but until then we toured the browser and settings pages comprehensively. The emulator is pretty locked down, just like we saw with the original WP7 emulator after MIX10, only internet explorer and a few settings are exposed. *Microsoft seems to have discontinued distributing VHD images of Office Professional.Yesterday we spent a considerable amount of time poking around inside the Mango emulator included in the windows phone developer tools 7.1 beta. There’s something similar for Office 2007 if you like to try out just Microsoft Office 2007 in a browser without Vista. You can explore Vista on your own, or follow along with guided exercises and videos. You get a chance to explore all features / programs included in Windows Vista (including games) and also Microsoft Office Profession 2007 as you may noticed in the screenshot. Now if that sounds a bit complex, here’s something more simple for you that requires no downloads or complex setup.Ĭalled the “Windows Vista SPI Ultimate Test Drive”, this product from TechNet Virtual Labs let you test Windows Vista online inside a browser without making any changes to your current work environment.
#BROWSER BASED WINDOWS 7 EMULATOR INSTALL#
If you want to run Windows 7 on your computer without disturbing the existing setup, the best option for you is to download a free copy of Virtual PC and install the associated Vista virtual image*.