Here's the latest on my troubleshooting for this browser failure issue. I installed Mozilla Minefield last night. It's another available browser in the repositories. Wow, is it ever buggy. But once it's fixed it will be the only one we will want to use! Great features, has almost all of the functionality of a desktop Firefox experience. Right now it's missing the full screen mode and text input only works in thumb board mode. Other little bugs exist too. But it does work despite the caveats.

So after installing and rebooting, I configured the new browser. After clicking on a few links here and there it did the same thing as the built-in browser does- just stops responding and cannot connect or browse any further without restarting the browser. I ran an extended ping in x-term during the "locked up" times in both browsers and I was getting decent response from sites like yahoo and google. This means that it's not the WiFi connection causing the problem. You could change the timeouts and power saving settings all you want, but it won't change the fact that the browser(s) are not getting through. Both of these browsers are based on Mozilla code. Something there is being affected by input from the user or some other code the device is running at the same time. And since the problem existed from a fresh re-flash to OS2008 that isolates it down to the apps and code from the official release.

Since OS2008 is responsible for the issue, there is a definite bug that I tossed into Bugzilla that hopefully someone will fix and release a new update for the broken/conflicting code. The bug ID is 2676.

If you have this problem, please be sure to add a post even if it's just a quick one to confirm you are having it too.