Oh, and don't forget Java Midlets! The HD2 has a built in version of Sun's J2ME VM and can run many of the popular mobile phone midlets like Opera Mini and these are
(annoyingly
) often more up to date than the native CE stuff that is available. Oh, and if you install one of the Opera Mini 4.x Russian mods, you can even do things like tab session restore/backup!
UCWeb is another good J2ME midlet browser. There is also a native version of UCWeb/UCBrowser for Pocket PC you can try but it's sadly a little older than their still actively developed Java versions.
Opera Mini for CE stopped at 5.x but the Java version is 8.0 and should run fine. Ditto for UCWEB CE/WM at 7.x with 9.x being the latest. Though, I'm not sure it matters that much as Opera Mini 4-8 seem to use the same server side rendering engine.
OneBrowser 3/iBrowser 2 is also pretty cool and has built in tab saving!
I'd also avoid UCWeb's 9.x version and stick with the 8.x builds as it seems they actually REMOVED a bunch of the more advanced features like page zoom for some odd reason. Ugh, I hate these trends of dumbing things down. It's quite funny, really. I just booted up Windows 1.01 from 1985 and the included MS Paint actually seems to do a little bit more than the more "modern" ones on Windows 7/8. It actually has a 3d box creation tool similar to the 3D tools that were introduced in Office 97.
Oh, and these same midlets will also work to give HPC2000 a more "modern" browser if you care to try and have RAM to spare.
It still kind of bugs me that these tiny proxy browsers almost have more features than their full native counterparts on CE. Even the Android stock browser seems very lacking when compared to things like OperaMiniMod or stock UCWeb.
There is Netfront 4.x if you can find a build that isn't demo expired. The QTWebkit ports to CE may also build a usable sample browser if you can get those going.
As well, there is the Tcl/tk based HV3 which you can run with eTcl which isn't exactly advanced but it does run.
http://tkhtml.tcl.tk/hv3.html
Oh, AND you can run some of the PalmOS browsers via Styletap if you really want to. The PalmOS Netfront worked last time I tried it on HPC2000. Unfortunately, I don't know of any other emulators with networking support outside of PocketDOS
(which only has Arachne and is likely slow
) so I'm not sure there are too many other options involving emulation. If miniVmac supported networking, I imagine you could run some of the desktop 68k mac browsers like IE 5.5 or iCab but it sadly does not yet. There's also Android and Desktop Ubuntu Linux for the HD2 if you are willing to dual boot just to get a better browser. Also, WP7 if you really want to deal with that crappy OS. There are actually no real alternatives to IE on that platform. There is UCBrowser but that still just embeds IE. There is also a hacked version of Opera Mini 10 and Opera Mobile 5 from Pocket PC that works but they don't support screen rotation or anything fancy like that.
Also, I'd watch out for that dang touchscreen. I'm almost on my 3rd HD2 as my last one has a nonresponsive touchscreen. It also doesn't help that I was testing Windows Phone 7 on it and there is NO WAY to back up WP7 and restore it on a replacement device. Macs can back them up and there is a 3rd party tool for PC but it can ONLY backup/restore to the exact same device because the backup if only even there as a failsafe during ROM upgrades. Ditto for WP8. Blows my mind that this crappy OS has been out since 2010 and there is still no real way to backup your personal data.
Anyway, I hope this helped.
Edited by TFGBD 2014-09-21 10:08 AM
Would the HTC HD2 still display You Tube videos? I'm asking because my CE6 netbook became unable to show You Tube soon after I bought it. Much thanks for any info. 
