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.I need a freeware emulator, so that I can run IE9 or 10. 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. The first approach is to use virtualization software, and then you can run IE in addition to just about anything else through a fully functioning Windows VM.Yesterday we spent a considerable amount of time poking around inside the Mango emulator included in the windows phone developer tools 7.1 beta. Let’s discuss how you can get Internet Explorer 9 on your Mac, there’s three main options: Bootcamp to have a full fledged Windows install beside Mac OS X.
![]() Ie9 Emulator Mac OS XThe first test is the popular HTML5test designed by Niels Leenheer. The Mango WP7.5 browser is on the left, the old WP7 browser is on the right.With the layout differences out of the way, on to standards compliance tests. Like the rest, these are 100% resolution captures that I'd encourage you to inspect at native resolution. I was loading live sites on both emulators (which required an uninstall and install), so there are some subtle differences in content, but the major things to pay attention to are layout, font, and the like. This now also appears to be much, much improved, from the pages I’ve browsed the difference is dramatic.I’ve put together side by side comparisons of a few popular pages to illustrate how things are different by using both the WP7 “NoDo” emulator and the new Mango WP7.5 emulator released yesterday. This is also reflected in the HTML5 test results, where it shows virtually all the form fields lacking support.Next up are some things from HTML5demos.com which illustrate a number of new HTML5 features. Both score 130 and 5 bonus points, though the WP7.5 version of IE 9 doesn’t fully support as shown by the lack of custom font on the score report.This is a huge improvement from how WP7 did previously in HTML5 test, where it scored 12 and no bonus points.One of the other important HTML5 features is new form field types, something that generally gets overlooked when side by side with other shiny features.I used a test put together by my good friend Jesse Gunsch and ran through it in the emulator, unfortunately WP7.5 still lacks support for many of the new form types, but no doubt making many of these work will require considerable UI work to match the Metro theme elsewhere. I’m not a huge fan of synthetic web tests, but HTML5test does do a nice job at breaking down support in an easy to follow manner.IE 9 on WP7.5 performs almost identical to the desktop version of IE 9. It also includes a test for whether SVG graphics are supported. Xbmc media player for macIt’s a dramatic improvement for both synthetic tests. It also comes close to passing the ACID 3 test. Before and after are a dramatic difference.WP7.5 now comes very very close to passing the ACID 2 test, failing only because the top of the smiley face is missing. Previously, WP7 catastrophically failed both tests. There are individual results in the gallery at the end from these tests.Next up are the two ACID tests. To test this, we compared performance on the same computer between the WP7.5 “Mango” emulator image and the WP7 “NoDo” image. Still, it’s pretty speedy.The next part of what’s changed is performance, both of JavaScript thanks to the new JIT compilation engine, and general browsing speed. The new browser still appears to render the page in successive chunks, and there’s a visible grey line at the edge of the current render progress when scrolling beyond the render state. I’ve put together a video showing the WP7.5 browser being used to go through a number of tests and load pages on AnandTech, DailyTech, and NYT. Animation for SVG doesn’t work, but image tag SVGs work absolutely fine, which is likewise a considerable improvement.There's a full (locked, current) emulator tour in the gallery, including a number of more tests and pages taken from the emulator, all from the Mango beta.There’s only so much one can communicate about how a browser looks and performs with still images and test results - things like smoothness, how zoom levels behave, and how both overscroll and fast scrolling look can only be illustrated with video. ![]() It's completely clear that the Windows Phone team recognizes that having a fully compatible browser is absolutely necessary on any smartphone platform, and have spent considerable amounts of time improving things in the mango update. Even then, we’re looking at beta software in an emulator, so it’s possible performance will improve even more before launch.
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