As I use the web on my Palm very often, and find that some unusual software helps make the most out of my wireless modem, I figured that it would be good to share the knowledge.

Warning! This page is no longer current. The reviews are still useful for what they are, which is reviews of particular browsers, some of which (notably PalmScape 5.0.a4) are still the best browser for many applications, but this set of reviews is no longer comprehensive, and omits many modern browers which are useful, and many which are not! =) I will try to update this website, as soon as I can, but in the interim I at least wanted to express this caveat! This list is still essentially comprehensive if you are looking for a browser to work with an older Palm, such as a Palm V or HandEra 300.

Introduction
Contrary to popular belief browsing the web with a Palm Pilot and a wireless (or land-line) modem is not an experience of endless waiting for castrated content. You can effectively and quickly browse the whole internet from the Palm Pilot--from frames, to forms, and SSL to 65,536 colors there are programs for the Palm Pilot that place the internet in your Palm. While web pages won't look quite the same as they do on your desktop, people are invariably surprised at how seamless and useful browsing the web on the Palm can be, especially if you use the correct tools.

Caveat
This page is a now a little bit out of date, because there are a large number of new web browsers introduced into the market, and some of the older browsers have new versions as well. However, while I do promise an update soon, this page is still quite useful. Many of the newer browsers suffer from extreme problems that makes the older browsers much preferrable for a number of reasons. I promise to offer reviews of these newer browsers, and sum up many of the problems with them, and some trends I see in Palm communication, but for the moment, what's here will have to suffice.

Palmscape 5.0.a4 (download, alternative download)
Palmscape is a little known browser in America, partially because it is of Japanese origin, partially because it is text-only, and partially because it is a terimus on a long development chain that is no longer updated or advertised. That said, however, it is easily the most powerful and flexible web browser available for the Palm Pilot and should be on every Palm Pilot that connects to the internet. Although the browser can support Japanese encoding in addition to the standard western encoding, the program menus are entirely in English. Indeed, this browser easily has the most intuitive and unobtrusive user interface, with a simple toolbar at the bottom of the screen that allows for all the standard browser functions. It contains very powerful bookmark and cache features, and has the little touches right; for example, if you try to connect to a specific URL and fail on the first try (this often happens if you ask the modem to start up and try to connect to a specific page at the same time, inducing a time-out error) you will not have to type the URL in over again. You can also always find the URL of the current page, and stopping a page download in progress is never a problem, as it is for so many Palm web brwosers. Palmscape is extremely fast (in both download times and general operation), and allows you to look at and scroll the through the page as it is being downloaded, as well as send a copy of the page (not the source) to the Memopad. It can even open Memopad files directly as text! That said, there are some limitations with this piece of software: it is a text-only browser, it does not handle frames, javascript, or SSL. It doesn't render tables particularly accurately (then again, many web sites use tables inappropriately) and on occasion you'll encounter a website on which Palmscape simply chokes (due to ill-advised placement of javascript, forms,and/or dynamic html on the page itself) and won't display anything; although this can hardly be considered Palmscape's fault, it is still annoying.

Palmscape 3.0 (more information, Japanese download)
As confusing as this might sound, Palmscape 3.0 is actually a much more recent version than Palmscape 5.0a4 The confusion results from the fact that these two programs are on entirely separate development tracks. While version 5.0a4 is a non-commercial text-only browser, Palmscape 3.0 is a commercial program from Ilnx. While the Japanese program is free, the English version must be purchased, which, combined with their lack of any advertising in the West, explains why the program is popular in Japan and almost unheard of in America. Like itself free predecessor, Palmscape 3.0 is an extremely robust, easy to use, and very stable. Unless you do some resource editing, you cannot have both Palmscape 5.0a4 and 3.0 on your Palm at the same time, because they share the same creator codes, and creator codes for the cache database.

AvantGo 4.0 (register, download)
Although AvantGo is primarily billeted as a conduit to sync web pages or special "channels" to your Palm Pilot from your desktop, it can also be used as a stand-alone browser in "on-line" mode. It is actually an extremely powerful web browser, and possesses what is by far the highest fidelity rendering engine of any Palm web browser. It is sometimes hard to justify keeping AvantGo installed because of the incredible amount of memory that it takes up, but although I find AvantGo too slow to use for general web browsing I do keep it installed. Although the program and all the associated files are huge, it is a remarkably stable program with very quick operation. Because it downloads graphics and preserves the formatting of pages as they would appear on the desktop amazingly well it does take some time for the pages themselves to download. It is especially useful for viewing complex tables whose meaning is difficult to discern when the tables are parsed incorrectly by a text-only web browser (usually more the fault of the page designer than the browser, but when you want information on the road that's not the point) and it can always be counted on to process complex pages that Palmscape might choke on.

Blazer (more information)
The original version of Blazer was a very fast web browser that loaded text first, allowed you to view the page as it was loading, and subsequently loaded the graphics. Blazer 2.0 extends the feature set considerably, adding support for frames and SSL, but becomes significantly more bloated, somewhat unstable, and while it does load the pages themselves fairly quickly, it is often difficult to interrupt the download of a page. Although they restrict the use of the free Blazer 1.0 through the extremely annoying device of having Blazer first connect to its own homepage, before allowing you to connect to the page of your own choosing, Blazer 1.1 is a nice middle ground between the fast and lean early implementations, and the bloated and unstable Blazer 2.0 Is it any wonder that with Blazer 2.0 the automatic homepage is MSN.com? In short, there are better browsers than Blazer in almost every area, although nothing about Blazer is particularly bad.

EudoraWeb (download)
Formerely the browser for the Qualcomm pdQ Phone, EudoraWeb comes as part of a suite that also includes an e-mail client. It is a text-only browser that delivers text-content very rapidly. While there is nothing wrong with this program, Palmscape 5.0a4 does everything it does somewhat better. Palmscape has a better user interface, supports a few more features, is more stable, takes up less memory, and tends to download pages just a smidgen faster. So EudoraWeb is a fine program, and has not gone through the reverse-evolution that characterizes many other Palm programs as their version numbers increase, but there's no reason to use it when an all-around better alternative exists.

Browse-It! 2.0 (download)
Browse-It! is billeted as an "upgrade" to ProxiWeb, which terminated at version 3.5 ProxiWeb was the most flexible web browser available for the Palm Pilot, but unfortunately Browse-It! is anything but an upgrade. It does incorporate the same concept, namely using a proxy server to mediate connection between the Palm Pilot and the web. This is an immensely powerful idea, for the proxy server can download a large web page quickly, strip it of unnecessary javascript, dynamic html, and other code that cannot be used by the Palm Pilot, compress the images, allow extremely long pages to be in segments, support frames, and SSL, and even open zip files and install prc and pdb files. Unfortunately, Browse-It! is so poorly implemented that it is not worth using except in the most extreme circumstances. The software itself is poorly written, very bloated, difficult to use, and quite unreliable. The proxy server often malfunctions, and does not support all the features that ProxiWeb supported some years ago. Unfortunately one cannot continue to use ProxiWeb, for the proxy servers themselves have been shut down after its acquisition by Pumatech. Pumatech tries to integrate Browse-It! with Intellisync, which is actually more worthless than Browse-It!--no easy feat to be sure. Although there is a Browse-It! 3.0, inexplicably, it is not a public release, but is meant for vertical market applications for private companies.

PocketLink (more information)
PocketLink is a relatively unknown player in the Palm web browsing market. It's fairly quick, supports gif images, and (notably) the installation of prc and pdb files. It's a bit outdated in supporting html 3.2, and not the html 4.01 extensions, but that isn't really much of a problem, especially on a Palm device. Unfortunately, I haven't been able to use this software as much as I would like, because it does not support Palm OS v 3.3; only v 3.5 and higher.

Power Browser (more information, download)
Power Browser is an academic project at the Stanford University digital libraries project, and has one of the very best interfaces of any Palm web browser available. It is also, perhaps understandably, the least promoted Palm web browser. It is based on a number of time-saving short cuts, including various kinds of proxy-generated summaries for web page content and navigation structure, keyword completion, and time-saving form entry techniques. Unfortunately, I haven't been able to use this software as much as I would like, because it does not support Palm OS v 3.3; only v 3.5 and higher.

zFrame (more information)
zFrame is still in beta, but promises to be a very interesting browser when the (plethora of) kinks are ironed out. It displays what is essentially a thumbnail of an entire page on the small Palm screen, and allows the user to quickly zoom in. It is still in the development phase, and is not really a usable product right now. Unfortunately, I haven't been able to use this software as much as I would like, because it does not support Palm OS v 3.3; only v 3.5 and higher. I would encourage interested users to contact ZFrame, and perhaps become part of their beta testing program.

WAP Browsers (AU WAP Browser, Wapaka, WAPman)
WAP, or Wireless Application Protocol, is a streamlined protocol originally developed for mobile-phones to handle low-bandwidth data content. There are also some WAP browsers available for the Palm Pilot, and there is, indeed, some good content available as WAP sites. However, there is a dearth of good WAP browsers for Palm OS. The only one that comes close is the extremely difficult to find AU WAP Browser (fortunately I've found it for you). Wapaka and WAPman are still actively under development, but the former is so unbelievably bloated, and requires so much free memory to operate beyond the program size, that I'm surprised it isn't made by Microsoft. WAPman is just incredibly poorly designed and extremely unstable.

Other Browsers
There are a few other browsers available for the Palm Platform, but aren't really worth mentioning separately. Movil-Go is a Spanish-language service, that may or may not be defunct, and has alternately used customized iSilo, Avant-Go, and Browse-It! clients as the front end for a web browsing service that provided some customized content on the side. There are some full-text web browsers available as web clipping applications, such as goAnywhere!, NetAlive, SnakeEyes, and the more sophisticated, but also more complex and German-language only WebToGo. I also would be remiss if I didn't mention the two other web browsers that also exist: ???, the first web browser for the Palm Platform, and HandWeb, an old commercial web browser from SmartCode that possesses few features, a hefty price tag, and due to the few resultant sales, is no longer supported. Indeed, SmartCode appears to have all but disappeared, but you can download a demo version of this software from me; it restricts the websites that you can view. One good thing that can be said about HandWeb is that in the demo you can view the Harvard University webpage. Actually, HandWeb is suprirsingly fast, even for a text-only web browser, and the interface has some potential, if only it was developed more fully. OmniSky also provides what appears to be their own web browser with their software, but it's actually the AvantGo rendering engine with many of the useful AvantGo features neutered. It does contain a somewhat useful set of bookmarks to paired-down for the Palm sites, and a marginally smaller foot print than AvantGo itself. If you have a Unix shell account, you can always use Lynx through telnet, but be prepared for screen width issues that will make you wish you were using Palmscape. There are a number of utilities and supplementary applications that aren't really web browsers that are still useful for the user who wants to go on-line, either with a wired or wireless modem and his Palm Pilot. Of these, LFtp, a very robust ftp client is a necessity, as is ptelnet, the best telnet client available for the Palm. You can also use the Palm and a wireless modem to control a desktop computer remotely, with either the freeware PalmVNC, or Win-Hand, which is more optimized for use with the Palm, but lacks the portability and general functionality of VNC. Sometime later I'll post a list of my favourite web clipping applications (PQAs) and POP3/IMAP e-mail readers.