Fennec Alpha 2
 

Well, no one has announced it yet...sooo here. Happy holidays :)

Re: Fennec Alpha 2
 

still no onscreen keyboard support?

Re: Fennec Alpha 2
 

Actually osk appears to work very well now, although in the preferences dialog it screwed up on me once. This version still has some rendering bugs and speed issues, but it is coming along very nicely. They reworked parts of the UI and made scrolling nicer (i.e. it is harder to accidentally expose the controls when trying to move down the page). I am looking forward to the final version, but I think this project won't really come to fruition until maemo 5.

Re: Fennec Alpha 2
 

It doesn't seem to work here with fields in a form.
Another big issue is that a double tap zooms-in then immediately zooms out but the viewport cuts the top left part of the page and the only way to restore is to close the browser.

Re: Fennec Alpha 2
 

You can use only small keyboard, full screen is unavailable.

Re: Fennec Alpha 2
 

I am typing this from fennec alpha 2.

This is faster and better than earlier versions, and i think this will replace microb for some pages, but itT is something i am going to use with microb, zooming also works a lot better than it worked in alpha 1.

Re: Fennec Alpha 2
 

Well, it's an alpha version... But I think it looks promising. I'm sure this will be a real alternative to the built-in browser. I especially like the tab support. The swipe left/right to expose or hide the tabs or controls greatly enhances usability.

Re: Fennec Alpha 2
 

Yep, it is _very_ promising, i love it this far, even if alpha state software works a bit crappy. :D

Re: Fennec Alpha 2
 

Well, you are typing, I guess you are not using the on screen keyboard.
On screen keyboard here works on the address bar but not in web form fields. I could not pop up the thumb size on screen keyboard, when I hit the central button on the D-pad the web page containing the form is reloaded (it probably acts as "submit" button). I don't remember if it was working in alpha 1.

Re: Fennec Alpha 2
 

Is a maemo 5 enabled device supposed to have a physical keyboard?

Re: Fennec Alpha 2
 

right now, we know little of the physical design of any maemo5 based device...

Re: Fennec Alpha 2
 

I like the jump they made between a1 and a2 but I still think it's too gimmicky, and its best gimmicks -- zooming, swiping, etc -- still have issues. It'll be great to have for those pages that absolutely need it, but it'll be a long while until this replaces MicroB for me.

Re: Fennec Alpha 2
 

Yeah, I missed that in my excitement that it works well for url input; pretty big oversight.
for the url input and inputs in prefs dialogs, Thumb launch of fs keyboard doesn't work, but if you use the center dpad button you can launch the fullscreen keyboard. Unfortunately, as others have mentioned, this does not work for form inputs, pressing it maps to enter and submits the form. This is a problem in MicroB as well, which I've been looking for a way to fix.

Re: Fennec Alpha 2
 

Yeah, I also tried the latest alpha. It wasn't as slow as I had anticipated, but then again, my expectations weren't that high. Gimmicky is also a word I would use. I don't really buy that method of tabbed browsing to be really quick or handy to use.

Dragging the entire page to the side, especially after zooming in, is not really a fun experience. Plus your position gets lost... Suppose you're zoomed in somewhere to the right side of a page, and would want to switch to another tab: goodbye to your page position. Or vice versa to the controls on the right hand side.

Does somebody wildly disagree with me? Am I missing the brilliance of the UI concept?

Re: Fennec Alpha 2
 

i noticed two things: it no more takes ages to start and it eats only a small peace of memory. :P

Re: Fennec Alpha 2
 

Even in Fennec Alpha 2 the improved Javascript engine (Tracemonkey...) is not enabled by default. You can enable this by creating a file

with the content
After restarting Fennec you'll see a noticeable speedup of pages with heavy Javascript usage.

After enabling Tracemonkey the sunspider benchmark result did improve from 85183 to 46931 for me (N800, Diablo with latest SSU update).

Re: Fennec Alpha 2
 

Why is Tracemonkey disabled by default in Fennec?