Iris Browser is a discontinued

web browser A web browser is application software for accessing websites. When a user requests a web page from a particular website, the browser retrieves its files from a web server and then displays the page on the user's screen. Browsers are used on ...

for

Windows Mobile Windows Mobile is a discontinued family of mobile operating systems developed by Microsoft for smartphones and personal digital assistants. Its origin dated back to Windows CE in 1996, though Windows Mobile itself first appeared in 2000 as Pock ...

smartphones A smartphone is a portable computer device that combines mobile telephone and computing functions into one unit. They are distinguished from feature phones by their stronger hardware capabilities and extensive mobile operating systems, which ...

and

personal digital assistants A personal digital assistant (PDA), also known as a handheld PC, is a variety mobile device which functions as a personal information manager. PDAs have been mostly displaced by the widespread adoption of highly capable smartphones, in partic ...

(PDAs) developed by the Torch Mobile company. The first version was released in 2008. It was one of the first mobile browsers to score a perfect 100 on the

Acid3 The Acid3 test is a web test page from the Web Standards Project that checks a web browser's compliance with elements of various web standards, particularly the Document Object Model (DOM) and JavaScript. If the test is successful, the results ...

test. RIM acquired Torch Mobile in 2009 and discontinued Iris.

Features

Iris is based on the

WebKit WebKit is a browser engine developed by Apple and primarily used in its Safari web browser, as well as on the iOS and iPadOS version of any web browser. WebKit is also used by the BlackBerry Browser, PlayStation consoles beginning from the PS ...

rendering engine with SquirrelFish Extreme,

Netscape Netscape Communications Corporation (originally Mosaic Communications Corporation) was an American independent computer services company with headquarters in Mountain View, California and then Dulles, Virginia. Its Netscape web browser was onc ...

plug-in

API An application programming interface (API) is a way for two or more computer programs to communicate with each other. It is a type of software interface, offering a service to other pieces of software. A document or standard that describes how ...

and

JavaScript JavaScript (), often abbreviated as JS, is a programming language that is one of the core technologies of the World Wide Web, alongside HTML and CSS. As of 2022, 98% of Website, websites use JavaScript on the Client (computing), client side ...

ECMAScript ECMAScript (; ES) is a JavaScript standard intended to ensure the interoperability of web pages across different browsers. It is standardized by Ecma International in the documenECMA-262 ECMAScript is commonly used for client-side scripting o ...

1.5. It has advanced

HTML The HyperText Markup Language or HTML is the standard markup language for documents designed to be displayed in a web browser. It can be assisted by technologies such as Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) and scripting languages such as JavaScri ...

and

CSS Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) is a style sheet language used for describing the presentation of a document written in a markup language such as HTML or XML (including XML dialects such as SVG, MathML or XHTML). CSS is a cornerstone techno ...

support and SVG,

XPath XPath (XML Path Language) is an expression language designed to support the query or transformation of XML documents. It was defined by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) and can be used to compute values (e.g., strings, numbers, or Boolean v ...

, and

XSLT XSLT (Extensible Stylesheet Language Transformations) is a language originally designed for transforming XML documents into other XML documents, or other formats such as HTML for web pages, plain text or XSL Formatting Objects, which may subseque ...

support. It supports a customizable interface and

touch screen A touchscreen or touch screen is the assembly of both an input ('touch panel') and output ('display') device. The touch panel is normally layered on the top of an electronic visual display of an information processing system. The display is often ...

control, pop-up blockers, and

XHTML Extensible HyperText Markup Language (XHTML) is part of the family of XML markup languages. It mirrors or extends versions of the widely used HyperText Markup Language (HTML), the language in which Web pages are formulated. While HTML, prior ...

1.x mobile profile support. It has advanced security features, advanced mobile key navigation,

HTTP The Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP) is an application layer protocol in the Internet protocol suite model for distributed, collaborative, hypermedia information systems. HTTP is the foundation of data communication for the World Wide Web, ...

cache optimized for low disk usage, History Auto-Complete and SSL and authenticated proxy support.

Performance

According to independent testing, Iris 1.1.5 loads pages more slowly than its closest competitor,

Opera Mobile Opera Mobile is a mobile web browser for smartphones, tablets and PDAs developed by Opera. History The first devices to run a mobile edition of Opera were the Psion Series 5, Psion Series 5mx, Psion Series 7, and then Psion netBook. They ra ...

. The UI was greatly enhanced all the way up until 1.1.9 which was released on July 6, 2009. According to testing done by Torch Mobile, Iris 1.1.2 outperformed Access NetFront 3.5 and

9.5 in the

SunSpider A browser speed test is a computer benchmark that scores the performance of a web browser, by measuring the browser's efficiency in completing a predefined list of tasks. In general the testing software is available online, located on a website, w ...

Javascript benchmark."

References

BlackBerry Limited Mobile web browsers Pocket PC software Software based on WebKit {{Mobile-software-stub