I think the problem is they didn't ship a browser based on WebKit, and from what I can see in my testing, it doesn't necessarily try to be WebKit-like in its rendering.

This means that website owners who have already written advanced web interfaces for the mobile browsers on iOS, Android, and BB 6.0 will have to re-engineer their code base for WP7. That probably isn't going to happen until Microsoft establishes an impressive user base.

Opera mobile solves that problem. Not that it is a problem in the first place. What bothers me about this phone are the missing features like copy-paste and multitasking.

Considering there is no NDK and no userbase, Opera would be crazy to port Opera mobile at this time. (I can see maybe Opera mini, but not mobile)

But the first version of it still matches or outperforms the Android and iPhone web browsers. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zgvphQx9MY8

You should try running NetScape 3 on modern hardware... It flies.

It's easy to optimize a subset when you can define the subset to exclude everything you can't make fast...

Maybe, for certain definitions of "outperform". I can't watch the video right now (at work), but no HTML5 or modern JavaScript engine means that it'll fall behind the web very quickly unless Microsoft provides updates.

Personally, I doubt that MS will provide those updates. The reason they keep IE6 outdated is because large companies want it that way; that can't handle epic change or their apps will break. If MS is marketing this phone to businesses, you can bet that the browser won't change much.

MS isn't marketing the phone to businesses. WP7 isn't shipping with support for 'enterprise' features like domain enrollment (though it does support Exchange, to some degree).

Also, let's say that companies start buying WP7 phones for employees, and that they pay to build a mobile-friendly version of some internal webapp. If you were designing/coding a site today, and knew you didn't have to support IE6, you most likely code it in a fairly standards-compliant way so that it didn't break when browsers were upgraded; a lot of companies are stuck on IE6 because they didn't code their sites like that.

The comparisons are about load/render speed of normal websites (like Engadget) and scrolling/zooming – not really about HTML5 or Javascript performance at all.

I wouldn’t say that anyone outperforms anyone else in that video – all three phones seem to be doing those tasks equally well (save for choppiness on Android).

They keep IE6 outdated? I thought they released IE7, IE8 and now IE9 after that.

I don't think companies are going to develop for just IE mobile like they did for IE6. And how exactly does adding support for HTML5 break the HTML for older web apps?

Their strategy relies on fragmenting the browser space. So, they have various subsets of various versions of HTML, each supported by a different browser on different platforms. All that so you can't deliver web applications easily.

Companies who swallowed their poison pill in the early 2000's and built their intranets dependent on IE 6 are feeling the pain now, having to deploy intrusive security measures that don't really secure anything while shouldering the cost of "upgrading" the apps to browsers that run on the OS they want to deploy.