Fennec 1.0b4
 

Beta 4 is ported to N900/Maemo 5... :)

...

I'm just quoting the feature list and changelog.

To install on N810/N900 or Windows/Linux/MacOSX, is rather easy, see quick start guide in release notes.

Re: Fennec 1.0b4
 

Wow! What a great update. It's still a bit slow and memory hungry, but the interface is to die for. I am looking forward to seeing where development is headed.

I'd love to see a port of chromium with this interface. Chrome is a browser of true elegence. I'm also a fan of the v8 engine.

}:^)~

Re: Fennec 1.0b4
 

BTW, it can also be installed on an N800 per the Release page (it omits mention of the N800 near the top, but lower down it includes it):
(and I'm doing it now)

Re: Fennec 1.0b4
 

Makes me wish I still had me n810 to play on...

Re: Fennec 1.0b4
 

In brief, clearly still a beta. Interesting UI, but for me it jumped around uncontrollably, sometimes giving me an unrequested sidebar, sometimes magnifying hugely.

It seems like it's set up to accept add-ons, but when I tried to install them, MicroB would launch and then the App Manager would inform me that I was trying to install something that was incompatible with MicroB.

Re: Fennec 1.0b4
 

and you have not seen it on an n900.

On this platform, the sloweness is gone and it seems stable from what I have been able to see.

Re: Fennec 1.0b4
 

Great !!! I have been using fennec ( recent dev version ) and it eventually replace my tear on N810 . The double click zoom in function with adds-on is a big plus than tear ! Much easier reading than Tear .

Re: Fennec 1.0b4
 

Does it support portrait mode ???

Re: Fennec 1.0b4
 

I've read that the fennec team plans to fully support portrait mode.

}:^)~

Re: Fennec 1.0b4
 

yes, me too, it's me that brang the information ;)
I just want to know it it's real :)

Re: Fennec 1.0b4
 

I like all the progress Fennec is doing in Fremantle. Still... it would be great if they would use the maemo.org infrastructure instead of forcing to install an own repo. It's also a big download, has anybody checked whether they are optifying?

Stuart and Jay from the Mozilla mobile team will be in the Summit. Looking forward to meeting them and ask them these questions in person. :)

Re: Fennec 1.0b4
 

Sadly their build system isn't easily manhandled into playing nice with the autobuilder. Hopefully something will be figured out at some point in the future. For now, non-free could provide a work-around, but it's an ugly one.

This build isn't but I talked to Mark last night and he said it's coming.

Re: Fennec 1.0b4
 

The Mozilla team is making sure that all pages render well, making sure that they improve the speed, etc. They are looking into Portrait Mode as well.

John

Re: Fennec 1.0b4
 

About the size, the localization is not even inside the .deb (I head that all the locales will be inside the binary package).

But sure, the fennec mobile app is bigger than the desktop firefox, it needs to be optimized (and I'm sure they know it).

Re: Fennec 1.0b4
 

Wow, much improved. If anyone wants to know why "Fit to width" might not be an issue for Fremantle's microb, they should check this out. But this raises the issue of zooming. Swirly zooming doesn't seem to work on my n800. It looks like font sizes might have to be controlled by a plugin or userstyle files. Kind of a fail if I understand things correctly.

It's obvious that this version of Fennec is optimized for Fremantle. The first "Tips and tricks" lets me know there's no software fullscreen button. Also, I guess multiple windows are not encouraged on n8x0's; I had to run fennec from the command line to get a second window.

The good about copying usability from mobile Safari: double-tap zooming

The bad about copying usability from mobile Safari: Look, I read plenty of long pages, I often need to bounce back and forth on these pages. Kinetic scrolling fails miserably here. How about some form of usable transient scroll bars/paging buttons? Think PDF viewer meets browser. Fennec doesn't even have the next-to-useless transient page-size indicators of mobile Safari. The auto page creation plugins are an overkill solution in my opinion. Somebody needs to blaze this trail, and if that somebody ends up being me it will represent a ball dropping by a project manager or their boss.

In my opinion, zooming, font resizing, and text reflow are still frontiers for this browser, but because of the introduction of double-tap zooming, these issues shouldn't be difficult to fix. Overall, very, very promising.

Lastly, how am I suppose to select text on my n800? I've tried a bunch of things, but I'm not sure I can. I'm installing on my n810 as I write this; maybe text selection is dependent on a hardware keyboard. More as I know.

Re: Fennec 1.0b4
 

Yes zoom to fit is very good on fennec.
Yes, from what I've seen, fennec is always fullscreen (as the others freemantle apps ?)

Ouch, why not juste open another tab ?
Try to swip from left to right and you have the list of open tab and
a button a the bottom for adding another tab.

I agree, I've been obliged to open a ftp directory with a lot of files, and the scrolling need to be optimized (and I'm gentle)...
Perhaps with commandkeys (a lot of command keys from firefox seems to be here).

Re: Fennec 1.0b4
 

Tabs would solve one problem if I knew how to do both of the following:

How can I open a link in a new tab?
Is there a history listing? If so, where do I find it and how does it work?

I couldn't find these answers on the Fennec wiki, but here seems to be the solution to my history question on the general wiki:

Nothing

Re: Fennec 1.0b4
 

As a workaround for the history, you can use the address bar.
(Taping the name of a web site give you the opportunity to visit it).

To open a new tab from a link, I've found nothing.

Re: Fennec 1.0b4
 

Can we foresee a Fennec - MicroB "war" in a close future? ^^

Re: Fennec 1.0b4
 

OK, I've not tried it on Maemo but... here are some observations:

• NoScript works now. Caveat: using it will require stylus.
• Adblock not available. Workaround: use Privoxy or hosts file instead.
• Bookmarks allow tagging; this is very useful for sorting your bookmark mess.
• Search Engines are on bottom during typing in Awesome Bar. Allows versatile gateways to information. (E.g. say you use IMDB a lot.)
• Mozilla Weave is updated to 0.7. Don't confuse with Google Weave.
• Did not crash, was fast, difficult to test out kinetic scrolling on desktop; hardware not comparable with N8x0/N900.

Re: Fennec 1.0b4
 

how do i copy a link location?
how do i save in image from a web page?
how do i save a web page for offline viewing?
how do i send a page by mail?
how do i go back to open tabs if i accidentally touched the "new tab" icon but really dont want to enter a new web address?
how do i copy text and images?
how do i use this browser in real-life?

it's really phenomenal how a browser that can do so little (and does what it does in such a complicated way) is so slow and has such a giant memory footprint.

(oh, and did i mention i had rendering issues with wrong fonts selected? why's this? shouldn't it render the same way as ff?)

Re: Fennec 1.0b4
 

You ask a lot of questions for a guy from Austria. :p

I agree, this little fox is neither sly nor nimble on the N8**'s

I'm going back to my UserContent managed microB using qwerty12's WMLbrowser plug-in and my locally stored HTML.

Re: Fennec 1.0b4
 

Yeah, I take back most of the good things I said. There's no way a QA person put this thing through its paces on an n8x0. And there's no need for me to be specific. Just browse your 3 favorite sites in separate tabs and try to bounce back and forth between them. Enjoy!

Re: Fennec 1.0b4
 

Well
still slow on the 800. Probably expected.
Got two out of memory errors when I had NYT and counterpunch loading in separate tabs.

Fonts were really badly rendered and got worse as I used the zoom buttons.

Back to Tear and MicroB

Re: Fennec 1.0b4
 

Hmm, YoDude, what do you do with the WMLbrowser? I just installed it, restarted MicroB, it says the plug-in is enabled, and I don't see what it's doing; or I don't know what site to go to in order to see it in action.

On Google Mobile, it wants to know what phone I'm using and doesn't seem to work with my N800 (at least if I put in Android or Other).

Re: Fennec 1.0b4
 

Not at all. Both teams collaborate closely and actually the Maemo Brawser engine development is done mostly upstrean in mozilla.org

Re: Fennec 1.0b4
 

:p

(you would prefer me to do some yodelling instead, right?)

ah, wml. i love this plug-in. i had all forgotten about the wml-sites i'd created years ago, yet at least one of them still exists! it even gets updated because the wml-stuff is automatically created via XSLT from the same XML-source that also feeds the HTML and PDF-versions. i should ask the owner for statistics one day... if it's still being requested by clients.

(being able to frighten the kids away with creepy stories from the past is one of the joys that come with age.)

Re: Fennec 1.0b4
 

it will be good if they can merge then... create the best possible browser in mobile device =) creating "MicroFennec-B" =)

Re: Fennec 1.0b4
 

try
http://members.aon.at/neumair/index_en.wml

it doesn't give you the full, shiny WML user experience, but it works. what would happen on a real WML device is that the WML-site comes up automatically when you go to http://members.aon.at/neumair/
also, there'd by a stunningly beautiful black-and-white image on top of the page. (and by black-and-white, i mean real black-and-white: no shades of grey) the plug-in can't handle this image format.
and of course, you wouldn't see all of the text on one page. the sections (properly named cards) would appear as separate pages on your handset. this is why you need the links in between for navigation.

now isn't it beautiful?

Re: Fennec 1.0b4
 

Hi All,

Perhaps I'm missing something, but I thought the built in browser on the N900 was built on Mozilla's engine. If this is the case why have Fennec? Which presumably is also built on mozilla tech?

Sorry if this is a stupid question, but it seems odd to have two browsers that seem to be from the same people (i.e. Mozilla).

Dex

Re: Fennec 1.0b4
 

Answer: for now, you don't! If you want to do these features you can vote or contribute at Bugzilla (example), put it in your bookmarks or sync with Weave, or you use your uberleet hacker browser.

You press the newly appeared Blue 'Back' Arrow at the right of the address bar.

Your use-cases, while not meaningless, do not make the browser unusable; on the contrary, the browser gives a kiosk-style, full focus web experience.

Perhaps the font is hard-coded in HTML whereas that font does not exist. Or you didn't erase your old Fennec profile.

The memory footprint, unlike MicroB it uses Xulrunner, so that alone uses more memory, and hence it'll never be as lightweight as MicroB. I'd disable MicroB at first, and its probably compiled with debugging enabled. Also, as of now WebKit renders JS faster than Gecko.

Re: Fennec 1.0b4
 

It's a good thing to offer people different options instead of forcing them to use some predefined application. For example some people may prefer the Fennec UI instead of Micro B UI.

Re: Fennec 1.0b4
 

Hi Dex, MicroB is a seperate project by Nokia, Mozilla Fennec is a revival of an earlier project called Mozilla Mobile. When Nokia started with MicroB the Fennec project was not yet (re)born.

Changes in MicroB are open source and backported when applicable. E.g. Gecko will receive improvements from all these projects. Mozilla and Nokia collaborate together, but each have different commercial priorities as well.

The projects serve a different purpose. Fennec's primary platform is Maemo, but also ports for Windows Mobile are planned. Nokia has no interest to port MicroB to other platforms (but you are free to do so, the source is there).

If you compare Fennec 1.0 betas with MicroB on N8x0 you also see very different way of using the browser, each having their own advantage and disadvantage depending on many factors. The Gecko-based browser on N900 and Fennec 1.0 betas are more alike. For example, because both assume finger-based touchscreen usage.

Re: Fennec 1.0b4
 

Some pages were surprisingly beautiful, which was great.

I ran into a fit to width type problem with a NY Times article. It displayed just fine at first, but the type size was so tiny that only my strange, myopic eyes could read it. So I zoomed it up to a decent size, and the edges of the article disappeared and you'd have to do a lot of backing and forthing to read the article. I wished for the infamous fit to width button and thought bad thoughts about Qole or whoever used to crusade against fit to width.

I was sorry to see that Xmarks wasn't available as an add-in, but the one Firefox is hyping was available. I don't like the bookmark manager Firefox is hyping -- it's slow and big and demands the equivalent of two passwords. Xmarks is the one to go with, I think.

Re: Fennec 1.0b4
 

Hi allnameswereout, thanks for yo very informative reply. That makes sense!

I know it's nice to have options, but it's nice to understand what makes the options different.

In terms of the stuff that goes on behind the scenes, is there any significant difference between the way Fennec works and the way MicroB works? (I know the UI is pretty different) Are they both roughly the same in terms of performance? Though surely if MicroB has matured since the N770/N800, in theory, that should be the better/more optimsed of the two?

Anyway, enough random guessing/musings. Thanks again for taking the time for such an informative reply.

Dex

Re: Fennec 1.0b4
 

I don't know the version of mozilla used in microb on the n900, but on the n810 (diablo) it is "still" a 1.9.a6 (firefox 3.0alpha1) where fennec uses a 1.9.2/3 (firefox 3.6/7) code base for it's rendering engine.

There has been a lot of improvement between ffx3.0 and 3.6/7 on the rendering engine (and the javascript engine, but I don't know if mibroB use it).

Re: Fennec 1.0b4
 

The biggest difference between MicroB and Fennec is XULRunner. Fennec uses the non-native XUL for its UI (which results in some slowdowns but increased portability) while MicroB (or, as it's likely to become more commonly known, Maemo Browser) uses the native Hildon, which results in a more "cohesive" experience on Maemo and better performance.

Re: Fennec 1.0b4
 

isn't possible to use the newer engine of Fennec in microb? (like someone used the webkit in the microb) ^_^

Re: Fennec 1.0b4
 

Sure, but you'd have to patch it up to work with eal.

Re: Fennec 1.0b4
 

mmm i'm not a developer so I cannot image how >.<, but this is a very good new for me, because it wuould improve alot the default browser (n8xx and n900...but mainly dhe n8xx series, they need it more xD) a os 2008's microb with this engine wuould give really a big choice to the "browser garden" of the tablet, expecially for the plugins!!!