Designed to give developers a valuable insight as to the various ins and outs of its forthcoming tablet, BlackBerry has added browser support to its PlayBook Simulator.

As such, studios can now get to grips with both how the browser works from a consumer standpoint, and the standards they can utilise in their web apps – Flash and HTML5 both on board.

Browser wars

"We are building one of the best uncompromised browsing experiences on a tablet with support for the latest industry standards and technologies, including HTML5 and Adobe Flash 10.1.," the firm says in a post on its developer blog.

"With this updated simulator, our web development community can now start testing their web applications and Adobe Flash applications to ensure that they fully support the upcoming BlackBerry PlayBook tablet at launch."

The firm says the simulator, which can be downloaded for free, builds on the existing support for web standards by adding support for HTML5 audio and video, though all codecs are not currently supported.

It's PlayBook's support for Flash in browser, however, that RIM will be hoping tempts consumers away from Apple's iPad.

[source: RIM]