Re: Fennec Alpha 1
 

Haha I would install this to try it out, but I think the last time I think it did xulrunner did bad things to my tablet (when uninstalled) which resulted in a reflash. Maybe after I back it up..

How has it improved since the last alpha?

Re: Fennec Alpha 1
 

it's probably more this:
than this:
what i need in a mobile browser was never less than i needed on my desktop. i need all the function plus the ability to, say, tell the browser to request the mobile stylesheet rather than the standard one. (neither microb nor fennec do this.) - you know, i don't browse differently (or go to different sites) only because i'm on the train rather than in my office. i don't switch personalities according to where i am. ;)

the "intended audience"-theory seems more logical to me: probably those who are content with fennec would also use it on a desktop.

Re: Fennec Alpha 1
 

Usually pages have a specific page for a mobile version of their website. Sometimes these are optimized for phones with keypads, sometimes for smartphones/mids/tablets/netbooks. These pages start with http://m.website.invalid or have http://invalid.mobi.

With intended audience I refer to people who do not wish to mimic their desktop browser experience on their mobile device. Instead, they will use the pros and cons of the mobile device and adapt the mobile browser to that.

No, I would not want to use Fennec on my desktop. I don't have a small screen on my desktop. I don't have a touchscreen there. I have far more RAM and CPU power there. And I don't have to think about battery power either. I can imagine people who are used to Opera gestures easily falling in love with [such] gestures as on Safari mobile or Fennec.

Back in the 90s we had some of the above restrictions but we usually simply used thin clients, and we had synchronisation with LDAP. Microsoft won the browser war and didn't implement LDAP in their browser.

Xulrunner still uses a lot of space on the tablet, and this won't change. I haven't tried uninstalling it. But I can understand why you'd want to do that.

Keep in mind its an rc of the first beta (b1rc2).

My experience with this release is as follows. Compared to MicroB and Safari mobile it renders the pages in an acceptable speed. Zooming in on text by double clicking doesn't work well. When trying to do this on a page with a lot of links (such as http://www.nu.nl which is a popular Dutch news site) this creates trouble. For such, I use multi touch on Safari Mobile and whether I like it or not: it is in such case easy and necessary. On Fennec this is problematic. After having clicked a link on nu.nl I try to zoom in on the text. Doesn't work. The other pages I tried were http://www.maemo.org and http://lifehacker.com (which first got me to the mobile version). Both rendered good and acceptable speed, and the zooming in worked. While browsing around on http://www.nu.nl trying to zoom in on text and scrolling around Fennec crashed. Twice. Zooming in is important on Fennec more so than Safari mobile because the fonts are worse on Linux.

Re: Fennec Alpha 1
 

Fennec still strikes me as a piece of demo software; they are showing off a new UI, but not really producing a very usable browser yet. Lots of little things are still missing, and several big things, too.

Re: Fennec Alpha 1
 

This plague started only recently and breaks the web.

Established web technology offers enough mechanisms to detect the capabilities of a browser/device and deliver content accordingly. Putting "mobile" versions off to their own domains is a little bit like WAP.

What are the "pros and cons" of a "mobile device"? Comparing my three cell phones and the tablet (all of which are mobile devices), they don't have a lot in common.

Also, how would working on a mobile keep my brain from thinking "Hey, the bottom of this page doesn't render correctly, go look at the HTML source to find that one link you're looking for"?
Do we have "View source..." on microB? No. What's the reason? "Because it's a mobile device and people don't do that on mobile devices". WTF? It would be one more item in a sub-menu; how could it make a UI more complicated? And if I want to examine the source of a boken page, why would I want to wait the whole weekend until I return to my desktop? I bought a mobile device so I wouldn't need to return to my desktop for such tasks!

The assumption that people "simply don't do" things on "mobile devices" isn't logical. So the idea to strip away functionality from a mobile browser isn't, either.

What is true, though, is that on a device that doesn't feature a 1024x768 display, a full keyboard and a mouse you need to adapt when it comes to displaying a page. You also need to map what you have as input methods (maybe only a numerical keypad and a D-pad, maybe a touchscreen, maybe a alpha-keaboard) to a cleverly designed user interface. The point here is "cleverly designed". You don't design a user interface by not offering anything that would need a user interface in the first place. That's not designing a user interface, that's not accepting the challenge. (Like: Want to improve the UI for MS Office? Oh yes, just remove all functions except "File|Open" and "File|Save". Great! Such a simple, easy to use interface!)

I know. In my wording, though, a "beta" is supporsed to be more or less feature complete, at least the UI and the overall look&feel should be. Otherwise there'd be no point in testing.

It being a beta excuses that it's still slow and it still has the same rendering bugs as the first alpha (these are bugs you can report and that can be fixed under the hood), but I hardly have any hope that we'll see a functional UI in the final release. (Which is a pity, because a XULrunner-based browser would offer quite a lot of funky things to play with... It just isn't worth the hassle if the browser itself sucks.)

Re: Fennec Alpha 1
 

This is my impression, too. OTOH, they say they're about to release a "beta", which is far from "demo" (unless you interpret this as "the beta of what will eventually be a piece of demo software when ready". well, maybe that's it...)

Re: Fennec Alpha 1
 

Its been going on ever since day 1. Some pages were still in HTML 3.2. We had WAP indeed. We had JS and Flash while many were still in dial-up. That too, broke the web. There is no 1 web. There is no 1-size-fits-all.

How are you able to detect my available up and downstream?

The content matters. The content is similar or the same. (Some heavy bandwidth stuff is left out). The layout is indeed different. If I go to http://m.lifehacker.com on GPRS it will load pretty quick. If I go to http://www.lifehacker.com on GPRS I'll have fun waiting given it'll be 1+ MB download. On UMTS the latter will load relatively slowly. Not to mention the former is sweeter for my mobile device. It'd actually allow me to have a few tabs and applications open.

I outlined some in my previous post, but I don't think you want to see these points. They have tons of things in common especially when comparing them with desktops and laptops. They're all running a RISC processor, probably all ARM. They all have a relatively small screen. Yeah, they don't all have the same screen size and same hardware buttons and perhaps even same OS. That is why something like Java is so useful on such OSes. And why porting is such a huge effort. There are ofcourse differences in a touchscreen mobile device and a non-touchscreen mobile device.

Normal users (the goal of RX-51 and Fennec) don't have this strange obsession. They just want to look something up on the web. When it looks odd, they might start to wonder.

For them your feature would be bloat just like e.g. kinetic scrolling is bloat for you. One could however add this functionality in an extension. For example a so-called web developer extension.

Which sub-menu?

Well, thats what rdesktop et al is for. Or you could load it up in a HTML editor. With syntax highlighting and such. Ofcourse, you would want to make me believe such features should all be included in a browser made for end-users.

Right, so you actually are a huge fan of Flash banners on your mobile device so you can torture your battery life? I for one, am not.

Sometimes less is more. Some people collect stamps. They wouldn't toss any stamp away. Most people don't collect stamps. Most people toss away things they don't use. Only some oddballs tend to keep everything they might need forever. And their house is a gigantic mess.

I can't seem to explain this to you. You don't seem to want to understand.

And, I feel sorry for you, because this is what mobile devices will move towards. They will adapt to 1) the hardware (which, like I said, has pros and cons) 2) what users want to run on it. I'm pretty sure that if there are going to be web developers who run Fennec and who'd like to view source code on their mobile device, they will make it easily work. However, I believe they'll be far better off with a 3rd party text editor or text viewer with kinetic scrolling and syntax highlighting. And those are usually not part of the web browser. Not even on the desktop.

True, but you need to focus on what the user wants to interface with.

If I browse to http://www.nu.nl for news I don't want a shitty Flash banner. I don't want to download a 1 MB Flash movie about the latest car while downloading the page. I want to see the headlines and being able to easily click on them, and zooming in on (certain) text. Thats what I want. Cause I want to read the news. I don't want to view the source code of the page to verify its W3C compliant.

Say you are using N810 and select an input box (for example to type URL). There are some likely things the user wants to do:

1) Remove a part of the URL
2) Remove whole URL and fill in new
3) Use http://
4) Insert URL

For option #1 you have in Safari mobile a small looking glass which allows you to easily select the part of the URL you want to edit. Because you're on a small screen this is useful on the device. On a desktop or laptop this feature would be utter nonsense. Except for disabled people. But they are a minority, an exception. The OS doesn't assume the user is disabled. (The OS won't assume the user is a web developer either...)

For option #2 you would select the whole URL on Maemo and then delete it using del or right click -> Delete. In Safari mobile you click once on the URL to select it, and then you press the X on the right of the URL to remove it. Simple, yet brilliant. Often used.

For option #3 all modern browsers assume http:// as default protocol. Small feature, but it saves you some typing.

For option #4 on a N810 with a slided out keyboard you would not want the virtual keyboard (a mobile-only feature which would be BS in standard desktop browser) but on a N800 you would want this unless you have a keyboard attached to it. For this, the N800 must know if it has a keyboard attached (HAL does this).

If all you have to do is reading documents such as .xls and .doc that'd be more than enough functionality.

Well, for end users it is feature complete for a 1.0, but if you would have looked at the roadmap you'd know its pretty long. Just like milestones of the old (such as Mozilla M17) were beta and such they at least allowed us UNIX users a browser for our desktop back in the days. Now we need a Gecko competitor for Safari mobile...

PS: Virtual keyboards suck IMO. I'd rather use a good hardware keyboard on the device. Even if the buttons are small the typing is much more efficient on such. This is clearly something users have different opinions about. That is why there is several choices in this aspect, in the form of different devices.

Re: Fennec Alpha 1
 

WAP did, yes. JS and Flash are bad habits, but don't break the architecture of the web.
I don't have to. Your browser tells me.
Not breaking the web means that, for example, when you're on WLAN, a browser on a Maemo device could request a full desktop version of the site, while it could specifilally request a mobile version when on a slow data connection like GPRS. It would always do so, not needing to know whether the mobile version is available at all, if it's domain.mobi or m.domain.com or www.domain.com/mobile/ ...

The architecture of the web says that this should be done using specific MIME-types in the HTTP-request and/or loading the mobile style sheet rather than the regular one. The URI should remain the same, though. Creating domains/subdomains/... for what should be handled in the HTTP protocol is not The Right Thing. Instead, my mobile browser on low bandwidth should send a request for www.domain.com, saying it would, if available, please prefer a mobile-friendly version, in German, if possible, encoded in UTF-8. It's as simple as that.

That's what it's all about. Same content=same URI. Layout and other issues to be negotiated within the HTTP-session, not by typing whatever URI the company chose for their mobile version.


That's probably it. ... Best explanation.
Which doesn't affect my browsing experience much.
Except that my N800 has a relatively large screen. Remember "desktop-size" was 640x480 not so long ago.
That's exactly the point. You have cell phones

• with touch screen and no hardware keys
• with touch screen and some hardware keys
• with touch screen and a full QWERTY keyboard
• without touch screen and some hardware keys
• without touch screen and a full QWERTY keyboard
• ...

The challenge for the UI is not the fact that they are mobile devices (which cell phones, of course, are). The challenge is that for each of them, you need to find user interfaces and workflows that best adapt to their specific input capabilities. For a touch screen without any hardware keys this will need to be radically different than for a phone that has no touch-screen, but QWERTY plus 10 additional function keys.
You consider looking at the HTML source a "strange obsession" that "normal" people don't have.
Me not being normal aside (second time you get personal here btw), what you say here just backs my original claim:
Reduced functionality has nothing to do with mobily use. If I have this bizarre fetish of looking into the HTML source, I will want to do it regardless of which device I'm at. Those who don't do it in the first place would also accept something like Fennec as their desktop browser, because they don't even realize there's something missing.
So the point remains that Fennec is a stripped to the bare minimum browser that maybe appeals to a certain type of users. Its user interface is in no way optimized, though, for mobile usage, as "mobile usage" as such doesn't mean less functionality, but only a different UI.


View?

No, that's what a mobile PC is for. rdesktop would require me to have my desktop PC up and running and connected to the net plus i'd need a way to get around the dynamic-IP-stuff... why would I want that if all I need is right in my hand?

I can see a pattern here....

Mobile devices are the hardware, they don't adapt to it. And the hardware is getting more powerful with each generation.
I don't see my laptop moving in this direction (it is a mobile device, isn't it), I don't see netbooks moving there... And as for the tablets: Yes, we see some strange things coming in the Maemo5 UI, but then: I can use any decent browser on it the same way I can use Claws instead of Modest. It's not a matter of "the device". It's a matter of software. And Fennec isn't particularly good software.

If I only want to read/write a text, I'd not install a heavy Office suite that has all it's UI removed. I'd maybe use Leafpad.

Re: Fennec Alpha 1
 

Strange when you're talking W3C standards.

Well, it is legacy, and won't change any time soon.

In the current way we assume based on browser id string what the user wants to see. They can easily click through to the full, non-bandwidth friendly version. They can even bookmark the full or the mobile version. The user can easily specify the URL, and m.website.com is very easy to type compared to www.website.com or website.com. So the current solutions are practical whereas yours aren't practical sound.

It does if you were served all kind of uncompressed, high quality data which your screen cannot optimally use anyway.

Nowadays that is not desktop size anymore. Nowadays people have big tellies.

For different devices different ports and different configurations.

If you take Opera, then you also had to say which phone you ran. For compatibility reasons.

The challenge is that for mobile phones and low-end mobile devices we had a good browser owning the market for years: Opera. Now we have mobile hardware with touchscreen, relatively more powerful processor, and hardware rendering. So we make use of that.

Yes, you know. Normal people. Who use MS Office. And MS Windows. And have a Nokia phone. Buy groceries at Aldi. Drink beer on sale. Have a BMW. Those people. Casual folks. Non-techies. Not freaks, not geeks, not rdesktop users, not open source fanatics, not web developers. Just Joe Sixpack.

Feature creep is not only refering to software bloat in terms of raw performance.

Yeah, and if you still want to use gopher:// you'll do it regardless of whether the software on your device does it. Except, most users, do not wish to use Gopher protocol. Having all kind of options (in text no less) will confuse the user. Instead, the user needs a limited amount of buttons and thats it. I don't see a 'go to homepage' button in Fennec or Safari mobile. Yet they exist in Mozilla Firefox and Opera. I haven't missed this in Fennec or Safari Mobile though. If I really missed something I'd get an extension. What sucks is that you can't install extensions in Safari mobile, and for Fennec and MicroB there aren't many available. But te latter will change after they got more mature.

You don't know how much you appreciate something/someone until you're missing it/him/her.

The certain type of users who want to get the job done of browsing on 'the internet' (http://) instead of reading HTML source code while taking advantage of the size and portability of their touchscreen based device. Are you talking about Mozilla Phoenix?

It isn't a mobile PC. If you want to do web development on your NIT go install Quanta or something using PB's KDE. Which, sadly, won't be optimized for touchscreen usage. Most people using a web browser on their small mobile touchscreen device do not do web development.

Because the tablet comes with a specific set of features. If you want more, you have to use extensions or 3rd party repositories or use your thin client to connect to your more powerful beast(s) which means rdesktop, SSH, usw. Getting around dynamic-IP-stuff is pretty easy, btw.

More powerful isn't an open invitation to bloat or feature creep (it unfortunately is... in practice...).

Laptops share some charecteristics because they are on batteries and mobile. But they also have a large screen, and relatively powerful hardware. Fennec is made for touchscreen, mobile devices; not for your laptop. And even then, there are various ports. There are various ports of Mozilla Firefox too. Fir various platforms. With different hardware. A browser like Opera Mini has good support for mobile phones. It allows the user to execute tasks using their keypad. We wouldn't want to use this on our tablet, because this is not optimized for this hardware.

Presto, WebKit, and Gecko have all been optimized a lot past years. Especially on JS. Do you think that is for fun? Its incredibly useful on mobile devices including laptops, netbooks, and smartphones.

Maybe you need to learn how and why Mozilla suite and Mozilla Phoenix got started. Mozilla Milestones were slow too. And unstable. Mozilla Phoenix was naked too in the 0.x series. Then it got extended. Features were added and added. But the developers do their best to keep people using extensions instead. Which, *gasp* are not enabled by default.

Re: Fennec Alpha 1
 

allnameswereout, should we just jump right to the point in this thread where one of us mentions "hitler"? Might save our fellow readers some time.

I cannot follow you any more. Flash breaking web architecture, .mobi-domains being legacy, ARM affecting my browsing experience, the N800 not being a mobile PC (Hey? What's this thing I have then? It sure is a mobile PC, and it sure has N800 printed on it), WebKit, Gecko, SSH.... you could start 34 threads with all this.

All I wanted to say is that I see nothing in Fennec that is specifically designed for mobile use (whatever "mobile use" may be in this context). I see a browser with basically no UI at all that requires an explanation on how to use the most basic functions (back, enter URI, ...). I can understand which type of users wants such a browser. And I predict that these users may eventually want such a browser on their desktops, too, because why they want it has nothing to do with mobile use.

Oh, and I don't like it, because it doesn't meet my demands. (Which isn't a crime, nobody said it was made specifically for me.)