I'll preface this by saying that I'm not a fan of SkyFire, so I didn't include it here because I never use it. Also, I didn't include Iris, even though I used to use it sometimes on my Mogul; I never did use it that much anyway.
So what I've done is compare three browsers that I use on a daily basis to see how well they render some of my favorite websites. I also picked some heavily formatted sites that I knew would at least give PIE some problems. The sites are:
http://www.engadget.com/photos/is-th...bile-7/561239/
http://www.engadget.com/photos/is-th...bile-7/561273/
http://www.orioles.com
http://cbssports.com
http://www.reddit.com
Not a scientific sample by any means, but a good collection of challenging sites that I would like to be able to browse on my Touch Pro. Let's see what happens!
Oh, but first here be the versions of the browsers I used as well as the rom I'm using (MightyRom 4.9.3 - click images for larger versions):
First, we'll see how Opera 9.5 rendered the websites:
The Engadet gallery loads correctly when I paste the URL directly into the address bar, but when I select another image from the page, it does not load the entire picture. I tried several times with several images and the results were always the same: only the top part of the image would load. The other sites loaded admirably; Orioles.com even behaved like the desktop version of the site, cycling through several news stories as I sat and watched. If you click on the link to the full VGA images, though, you might notice that they seem a bit "fuzzy". This is a complaint that I have with Opera and, along with the unreliable page loads (like the Engadget gallery), it prompted me to find another browser that I liked better.
So with that in mind, let's look at the PIE versions of the same sites:
As you might have guessed, PIE drops the ball and poorly renders most of the sites above. However, PIE is great for mobile versions of some sites, like orioles.com and mlb.com - during the baseball season, I use PIE to follows games using Gameday Mobile. It works much much better than Opera and Netfront in this respect.
Finally, let's take a look at how Netfront behaves:
Netfront renders pages correctly and everything is crystal clear on my VGA screen - images, text, etc. I also like the zoom functionality demonstrated in the engadget gallery above, but a caveat is that you cannot zoom in any further than what you see above. Not a problem for me, because I have good eyes (read: strong contact lens prescription) but text may be a bit small for some.
Netfront is not without its problems, though. There are a ton of popup warnings for some reason, I had to disable javascript on orioles.com so it didn't scroll through the news stories like Opera did, and it is a "concept edition", meaning it expires every month or so and you have to go through the process of re-downloading it. Also, sometimes entering text/clicking on links with your fingers is tedious, but usually navigating with the stylus works well.
So for me, Netfront is the browser I use the most because of how well it replicates the desktop experience. I want to like Opera - really, I do - but it just hasn't lived up to hype for me. I'm really excited to try the new PIE from the Treo Pro, though.