Excellent web browser, Flash and all
The great web browsing skills have been an inherent part of the Android platform since day one. Now that we are at version 2.1 things are even sweeter with the intuitive user interface even more polished and the functionality reaching new heights.The user interface is pretty much nonexistent at first glance. With pinch-zooming enabled you don’t even need the +/- zoom buttons that we have seen on most other Android handsets.
The address bar is locked at the top of the page so you can scroll down and hide that too. However you don’t need to scroll to the top every time you want to tap a new address – just press the menu button and invoke it anywhere on the page.
The Wildfire browser also supports double tap zooming and text reflow, for comfortable reading of longer texts on the phone display. Without text reflow you will either have to zoom out until the text fits (but then it’s too small to read comfortably) or scroll sideways to read each line.
The minimalist UI is still quite powerful – hit the menu key and six keys pop up. You can open a new tab, switch tabs, refresh the page, go forward, open bookmarks. The last button reveals even more options (text copying, find on page, etc.).
Web browsing is a pleasurable experience on the HTC Wildfire
The bookmark list shows a thumbnail view of the bookmarked pages and you get a “most visited” list in addition to the regular history.
Bookmarks, most visited and History lists
And to sweeten the deal even more, HTC Wildfire has Flash support in its web browser. Its performance is hardly spectacular but it’s better than nothing. You should definitely pick simpler Flash games, but it’s good enough for those to run just fine.
Flash video support is also pretty dodgy with the Wildfire failing to play the Vimeo and Netcafe videos that we tried. YouTube works fine but it uses the preinstalled YouTube application so it doesn’t really count.
The YouTube application
Mind you, the Android 2.1 browser has support for HTML5 and its video tag but since that is a few years (at best) away from becoming the norm we won’t be crediting it with extra points.
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