While it might not be quite as exciting as Firefox for mobile phones, MobileRead forum member Adam B has enabled web browsing on the iLiad eBook reader.

It turns out the iLiad ships with a stripped down version of the Minimo web browser for reading HTML files. Out of the box, you can't browse the web with this version of Minimo. But Adam B has released an update that effectively unlocks Minimo on the black and white device.

Minimo is not an official Mozilla project, but the mobile web browser is based on Mozilla code and hosted on Mozilla.org. Now that Mozilla has announced plans to develop a mobile version of Firefox, we suspect there won't be much more development in the Minimo space.

[via jkOnTheRun]

Could thisbe the start of "Browser Wars 2, the quest for the stronghold on the mobile world"?

Microsoft has just entered the space with their new enhanced mobile browser offering, Deepfish. The Deepfish browser plays off of what the iPhone showed us a short while ago, showing the user a recreation of desktop browsing on mobile devices, not stripping anything out. Deepfish gives users on mobile devices an identical look and feel of pages rendered on typical desktop setups. The application allows scrolling and zooming in and out of web pages, enabling increased readability, standard navigation, and simple form submission. When completely zoomed out, images are lossy, but zooming in provides more detail. If you are a little worried about your Windows Mobile device struggling when browsing with all of this extra content, don't be, Deepfish has bandwidth optimized rendering for faster content delivery.

Microsoft might be getting a little worried about Opera, and Mozilla's minimo.2 quickly entering the Windows Mobile device space and quickly starting to become the default offerings.

Deepfish is sadly in an invite only mode at the Microsoft Live labs. It's for Windows Mobile Smart Phones or Pocket PC's running Windows Mobile 5.0+, with a minimum of 64 MB program memory.

Check out a video of Deepfish's capabilities.

Last time we checked in on the Minimo project, the Windows Mobile web browser was in its infant stages. Now, with the release of version 0.2, it might be safe to call this little guy a toddler.

The version of Internet Explorer that comes with Windows Mobile tends to be a bit on the anemic side. Pages are slow to load, and there's no support for tabbed browsing.

Minimo is not an official Mozilla project, but it is hosted on Mozilla.org. The browser takes many cues from Firefox, and the browser tabs even look like Firefox tabs.

Unfortunately, the latest release is only available for Windows Mobil 5.0 and newer devices. The Minimo team recommends anyone with an older model download version 0.16.

The Mozilla Foundation has released a new version of the Minimo browser for Pocket PCs running the Gecko rendering engine. This is the first version that works on Dell Axim X50v (full-VGA) devices. 

The Minimo browser is not a light version of Firefox, but a completely new browser based on the Mozilla codebase, much like Firefox was when it was started. 

It's exciting to see alternatives to IE being released for Pocket PCs. While Minimo still has some issues, it appears to do a more faithful job rendering many sites than Pocket IE does.