Iris Browser

» see torchmobile.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the goodbye ~

Iris was a web browser for Windows Mobile and Windows CE, which in 2008 meant it ran on the resistive-screen business phones and the PDAs that were losing a war they had not noticed starting. What made it worth writing down is the engine. Iris ran WebKit, the real desktop-grade thing, with SquirrelFish Extreme underneath the JavaScript, and it handled SVG and XSLT on hardware that had been specified to display a calendar.

Torch Mobile built it, and the company came from George Staikos, who had spent years on KHTML inside KDE and then led the work to get WebKit running on Qt. That lineage is the whole story of the browser. KHTML became WebKit and WebKit became portable, and a small team carried the portable version somewhere Microsoft's own mobile browser had never managed to go.

The reviews were consistent. Iris rendered pages more correctly than anything else on the platform and loaded them more slowly than Opera Mobile, which was the browser most Windows Mobile owners were already sideloading. Version 1.1.9 shipped on 6 July 2009.

~ the chronicle ~

~ the Acid3 run ~

Acid3 was the standards-compliance test everybody in browsers was chasing in 2008, and it was hard enough that shipping desktop browsers were sitting in the seventies and eighties. Iris scored a perfect 100 on a phone. The claim sounds like marketing until you remember what it was running on, which is a device with a few hundred megahertz and a stylus.

It also tells you what Torch Mobile was actually selling. A browser you buy for your HTC is a small business. An engine team that has demonstrated WebKit running correctly on constrained hardware is a very different asset, and there were only a handful of companies in 2009 who badly needed exactly that.

~ what really happened ~

Research In Motion announced the acquisition of Torch Mobile on 24 August 2009 for an undisclosed amount. The reason was not subtle. The BlackBerry browser was the worst thing about the BlackBerry and the iPhone had made that impossible to ignore, so RIM went and bought people who had already made WebKit work on small devices.

Torch Mobile stopped making browsers for Windows Mobile and Windows CE the same week. The work reappeared a year later as the WebKit browser in BlackBerry 6, and RIM put the word Torch on the front of a phone, the 9800, which is the closest thing Iris got to a headstone. Windows Mobile itself was dead within two years, so the platform Iris was abandoned on did not outlive it by much.

None of this reached me. Turkey in 2009 ran on Nokia and Symbian, and a Windows Mobile PDA was a thing your company handed you rather than a thing you went out and bought. Iris was a better browser for a category of device that Turkish buyers had mostly skipped on their way from feature phones to Android.

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