Surf the Web from your handheld, Smartphone, or cell phone and there's a fair possibility you are doing so by means of the most widely deployed non-PC browser on the planet, NetFront from ACCESS.

How widely deployed is NetFront?

Try over 150 million licenses for 342 unique products. Besides PDAs and handsets, NetFront has found its way into a number of other types of devices, such as TVs, set-top boxes, cars, game consoles, kiosks, and e-mail terminals.

ACCESS attributes NetFront's success to its small footprint and performance, as well as the company's ability to work effectively with manufacturers and mobile operators on the integration of the browser into their products and services.

The company avows foresight is another factor.

President & CEO Toru Arakawa emphasizes how "years ago, ACCESS envisioned a world powered by a ubiquitous Internet where we would all be living, working, and playing through Internet devices not yet invented."

Browser Specs
NetFront supports the WAP 2.0, WML, HTML 4.01, and cHTML Internet standards. ACCESS says Smart-Fit Rendering alters full Web pages to fit mobile device screens, while Rapid-Render hastens page loading. Supported PDA and smartphone platforms include Palm, Symbian, Linux, Windows Mobile, and BREW.


NetFront in Action

A recently announced update to the NetFront engine, version 3.3, adds support for Dynamic HTML, intelligent frame handling, pop-up blocking, and Really Simple Syndication (RSS). Other enhancements include Atom Feed—a file format for content distribution via XML used to access popular Weblogs—support for international domains, encryption, the capacity to save Web data with a specified URL, in addition to password and data management.