Blazer was a

web browser A web browser, often shortened to browser, is an application 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 scr ...

available for

Palm Palm most commonly refers to: * Palm of the hand, the central region of the front of the hand * Palm plants, of family Arecaceae ** List of Arecaceae genera **Palm oil * Several other plants known as "palm" Palm or Palms may also refer to: Music ...

handhelds running

Palm OS Palm OS (also known as Garnet OS) is a discontinued mobile operating system initially developed by Palm, Inc., for personal digital assistants (PDAs) in 1996. Palm OS was designed for ease of use with a touchscreen-based graphical user interface. ...

3.1 or higher. The original version of Blazer was developed by Bluelark Systems and was released in November 2000. Bluelark Systems was acquired by Handspring a month later, in December 2000. Version 1.0 supported

HTML Hypertext Markup Language (HTML) is the standard markup language for documents designed to be displayed in a web browser. It defines the content and structure of web content. It is often assisted by technologies such as Cascading Style Sheets ( ...

, WAP, and the markup language used in

i-Mode i-mode (, ) is a Japanese mobile internet (distinct from wireless internet) service operated by NTT DoCoMo. Unlike Wireless Application Protocols, i-mode encompasses a wider variety of internet standards, including web access, e-mail, and ...

. Following the end of popular use of Palm OS, Blazer is no longer developed.

Version history

Blazer 1

Blazer 1 was released in November 2000, and differentiated itself from other Palm OS web browsers at the time by its fast performance, progressive rendering, and support of WAP and i-Mode in addition to HTML. It utilized a proxy server which provided transcoding and image conversion optimized for small, underpowered handheld devices. Blazer 1 was available for free download.

Blazer 2

Blazer 2 was released in early 2002. Blazer 2 added the ability to use proxy servers, SSL, 16 bit color, and an improved user interface. Blazer 2 was available both as product bundled with the Treo 180, and as a paid download. As of September 22, 2005, all copies of Blazer 1 and 2 were rendered inoperable as the proxy server for these browsers was taken offline by Palm.

Blazer 3

Blazer 3 was a significant upgrade in the series. Palm, Inc. dumped the original code for Blazer and started fresh with the NetFront Browser Engine (most notably used in the

Sony is a Japanese multinational conglomerate (company), conglomerate headquartered at Sony City in Minato, Tokyo, Japan. The Sony Group encompasses various businesses, including Sony Corporation (electronics), Sony Semiconductor Solutions (i ...

Clie) as the core of the Blazer browser. It is bundled with Treo 600.

Blazer 4

Next came Palm Blazer 4.0/4.1. It was bundled with the Tungsten E2, the Tungsten T5, and the Treo 650 and 680. New features included faster loading, an improved UI, VPN with an extra plugin, the saving of image and

files to a memory card or the device, homepages, bookmarks, and the ability to start on the last viewed page. Blazer 4 also featured support for web standards including

4.01,

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

1.0, WML 1.3, SSL 3.0, cHTML,

JavaScript JavaScript (), often abbreviated as JS, is a programming language and core technology of the World Wide Web, alongside HTML and CSS. Ninety-nine percent of websites use JavaScript on the client side for webpage behavior. Web browsers have ...

1.5, CSS 1.0 and 2.0 (partial),

GIF The Graphics Interchange Format (GIF; or , ) is a Raster graphics, bitmap Image file formats, image format that was developed by a team at the online services provider CompuServe led by American computer scientist Steve Wilhite and released ...

(both still and animated, along with transparency),

JPEG JPEG ( , short for Joint Photographic Experts Group and sometimes retroactively referred to as JPEG 1) is a commonly used method of lossy compression for digital images, particularly for those images produced by digital photography. The degr ...

, PNG, BMP and
cookie, Cookies
. The use of some advanced features may cause the browser to crash if it is not in Wide Page Mode. Soon after, Blazer 4.3 browser became available on the Treo 650, TX and LifeDrive. The most significant addition to 4.3 was the fast mode option, which removes images and/or disables cascading style sheets. Blazer 4.5 was released in May 2006, along with the Treo 700p as part of the device's application suite. It offers faster page rendering, and support for

streaming video Video on demand (VOD) is a media distribution system that allows users to access videos, television shows and films digitally on request. These multimedia are accessed without a traditional video playback device and a typical static broadcasting ...

(using a built-in version of Kinoma Player). It was also provided with the Treo 755p along with a mobile optimized version of

Google Maps Google Maps is a web mapping platform and consumer application offered by Google. It offers satellite imagery, aerial photography, street maps, 360° interactive panorama, interactive panoramic views of streets (Google Street View, Street View ...

Streaming video

Video is streamed via the Kinoma Video Player. It supports many formats, including Windows Media. At this time, Blazer does not support Adobe Flash Player - meaning you cannot view popular videos on sites such as ESPN or YouTube. This issue has never been addressed by Palm. A relatively small number of phones have the ability to use Flash. The new Centro has demonstrated the ability to play YouTube videos on its browser using a high speed internet connection. This is demonstrated on the mobile version of

YouTube YouTube is an American social media and online video sharing platform owned by Google. YouTube was founded on February 14, 2005, by Steve Chen, Chad Hurley, and Jawed Karim who were three former employees of PayPal. Headquartered in ...

which does not use Flash Technology. Previous Palm phones with the current version of Blazer can also play these videos. This is the same version of YouTube accessed by the application of the same name on the Apple

iPhone The iPhone is a line of smartphones developed and marketed by Apple that run iOS, the company's own mobile operating system. The first-generation iPhone was announced by then–Apple CEO and co-founder Steve Jobs on January 9, 2007, at ...

. Kinoma released an upgrade to the Video Player, which can be purchased for many Palm phones, that has support for Flash Video, but is not part of the Blazer web browser itself. The videos must be searched for via the Kinoma media guide. This guide acts as a browser for many popular video sites, like

and Google Video. Many Palm users could get a discount on this upgrade.

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Blazer (Web Browser) Palm OS software Discontinued mobile web browsers