Help ?! Do I need a browser update?

[sleight007]

When I visit the "comcast.net" website. It says I am using an old browser. I can't seem to click on any of the buttons. I have a Ipaq 1945 running 2003 operating system. I also have the flash player 6.

Any HELP?!

PS. New to forum. and Thanks in advance.

[Jason Dunn]

Welcome to Pocket PC Thoughts! :-)

To answer your question, what's happening is that Comcast is trying to detect your browser type, and it's failing because it can't recognize Pocket Internet Explorer, so it's giving you that error.

If you really need to access that page, you can try using RegKing to alter the browser user agent string - the thing that tells the Web server on the other end what type of browser it is:

http://www.cewindows.net/applications/regking2003.htm

One thing to remember though is that when you do this hack, when you come back to sites like ours that have mobile versions, you won't get pushed to the mobile version because, you guessed it, your browser will be telling us that it's IE 6.0, not Pocket Internet Explorer.

[sleight007]

How much trouble will I have if the sites don't know that I am on a browser? Do ALL sites recognized it now?

[Kati Compton]

How much trouble will I have if the sites don't know that I am on a browser? Do ALL sites recognized it now?

If you change it to IE, you wont have a problem *getting* anywhere, most likely. But you *won't* have the advantage of the sites that *do* detect for mobile devices to provide a more cleanly formated and less graphic-overloaded interface.

I think it might be nice in the future for sites that have multiple versions to have a way to set preferences. So, each time a registered user visits with a different browser, add it to the list of browsers for that user (it could be implemented more efficiently than this in actuality, I'm just describing from the user's point of view). The default view for the browser would be a guess based on whether it's a full browser or a PDA or phone browser. But the user would get to override that selection. I think this will become important as we have more small PCs (OQO/Flipstart/Sony's little one/etc), and bigger-screened higher-res PDAs...

But I digress. ;)

[yankeejeep]

If you are a little hesitant about dealing with the registry up close and personal, there are several apps available that allow you to make changes (such as the way your browser identifies itself) through a more friendly interface. I use Tweaks2k2, which will allow you to turn the identification as IE 6 on and off through a check box.

Something else to remember when spoofing PIE as IE 6. PIE will not have the same security protections as the real IE 6 and will not handle Java scripts well. So don't confuse changing Pocket IE's way of identifying itself to hosts as being the same as actually doing online access with IE 6.

[Kowalski]

when i log in my yahoo mail account using my ipaq, it changes the look of my mail page, so when i open the page in desktop computer, i have the old version of yahoo mail.