Everybody who has problems with MicroB...
 

...please check out the following bugs and vote/comment on them as you consider fit:

Hangups when rendering pages:
https://bugs.maemo.org/show_bug.cgi?id=3703

Memory leakage:
https://bugs.maemo.org/show_bug.cgi?id=3704

Browserd being a problem, not a solution:
https://bugs.maemo.org/show_bug.cgi?id=3705

Hopefully, if enough people tell of their experience with the latest browserd-based browser, we can make Nokia fix it.

Thanks.

Re: Everybody who has problems with MicroB...
 

The only problem I have encountered that if you use the "back"-button twice, quickly one after another, the browser will hang with ~100% CPU. This is new to the latest version of Diablo.

And I tried the livejournal page you mentioned in your bug report, and it loads perfectly, no hangup and no extensive CPU load.

So the bug is not in microb!

I suggest, though, to get rid of any "addons" including adblocker. In my experience, they just do harm and make the browser slower.

Re: Everybody who has problems with MicroB...
 

Some of the add-ons are plainly not working with the new browserd MicroB.

Re: Everybody who has problems with MicroB...
 

Try some other livejournal pages. The problem appears to manifest itself in about 70% of cases.

The "bug" (or bugs, really) is in browserd, a daemon part of MicroB that you do not see. MicroB is just a frontend to browserd in the current version of Diablo. All the important work is done in browserd and this is where most problems occur.

While I disabled AdBlock for testing, I cannot simply get rid of it: the amount of advertising on the web is too much for me nowadays, especially over GPRS connection when on the road.

Re: Everybody who has problems with MicroB...
 

Well, MicroB is Maemo's branch of Gecko, so, yeah, MicroB is browserd.

Everybody refers to the whole browser as MicroB in generic use, though.

Ad blocking CSS and hosts are much lighter-weight than AdBlock Plus. Turning off images is available again in the latest update, so that's another option for reducing the amount of data that needs to be pushed around over GPRS.

Re: Everybody who has problems with MicroB...
 

Some heavy-Javascript pages in livejournal do indeed load quite slow. Once you switch off JS, the experience is much better.

So far I never had a reason to kill browserd. Only the frontend has some hickups when using the back button too quickly - my only complaint.

Re: Everybody who has problems with MicroB...
 

Well, to be more precise:

1. MicroB application is a thin shell that uses browserd for everything, including rendering and JavaScript. By itself, this application does not crash very often as it does not do much work.

2. Gecko is a rendering engine rather than a browser. It runs inside browserd and handles HTML and CSS rendering. My guess is that it is responsible for a half of all problems (especially with CSS).

3. In addition to Gecko there is a JavaScript engine also running inside browserd. It is probably responsible for another half of the problems.

4. Finally, there is code responsible for loading and caching web pages. It is unlikely to cause as many problems as other two parts though.

Neither does acceptable job removing ads though. This stuff fails for cases where ads are not placed into specially named containers and served from the same server as valid content.

Turning off images leaves placeholders, sometimes occupying up to 2/3 of the page estate. In other words, turning off the images saves traffic but leaves page difficult to navigate.

Re: Everybody who has problems with MicroB...
 

MicroB is the engine, not the application.

Re: Everybody who has problems with MicroB...
 

Quoting from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MicroB:

Re: Everybody who has problems with MicroB...
 

Yeah, well, I wrote that. :rolleyes: For the purposes of Wikipedia, it wasn't really worth getting technical over it.

Re: Everybody who has problems with MicroB...
 

Okay, FF3.1 JS is another 7x times faster than 3.0 and is already stable-ish, CSS has almost full 3.0 support and 85/100 on ACID3, so when the time comes Nokia to update MicroB, there are options available... Let's hope that's before FF4.0 comes out.

Now that i'm writing something which has to look good in MicroB, i'm seeing where the decision to adopt an alpha engine pays off. :)

Re: Everybody who has problems with MicroB...
 

None of these extensions will fix the subject of this thread though. The problem is that at some point Nokia decided to put the whole FF-derived browser into a daemon, difficult to kill if it fails and using gobs of shared memory for communicating with clients. Given the sheer size of the engine and its complexity (read: propensity to failure), making it resident does not seem to be such a good idea, especially if all it does is shaving 2 seconds off the startup time.

I would say, make it optional, the same way Python Launcher works.

Re: Everybody who has problems with MicroB...
 

JS is actually the biggest problem in microb and the N8xx generally. There are tons of sites which demand a quadcore-2G processor to be run efficiently - and that's where our tiny N8xx will forever fail.

Normally I browse with JS switched off, a much faster browsing experience.

And yep, ad-blocking with CSS is the way to go, as GA has mentioned.