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Posts: 65 | Thanked: 56 times | Joined on Oct 2013
#341
Decent web browsers and text editors are needed for Sailfish:

(1) Automatically wrapping text: when you cannot read the text, you zoom in, and the text column fills the whole width of the screen, and the enlarged text wraps up correctly. This is how Opera Mobile browser works. But Firefox on N9 is poor in this respect. As the result of this nice feature, however, on some large pages the "focus" jumps to unwanted parts of the page too easily. Therefore, there should be an option to turn off the automatical text-wrapping feature. Then will be needed feature nr. 2.

(2) Adjustable text size, like the Symbian phones and N900 of Nokia have, but later models don’t. 3 or 5 levels would help (Very large / Large / Normal / Small / Very small). Zooming usually does not help. If zooming is the only method of making text legible, it means that on many web pages and text editors, when zooming in, you have to scroll the text horizontally twice on every line of text (to see the ends of the lines), which naturally does not make sense. Only on the best web pages and online-editing services the text wrapping compensates the lack of text-size adjustment. Several “hacker’s” text editors for Maemo and Meego phones have had desperately small text sizes (even with the largest text size, on phones which has 3 or 5 text size availalbe). MeeTextEdit for N9 is one of the few exceptions - although it has only few features, they have been implemented with care. I don't mind if text-size adjustment affects also other applications, like on most Symbian devices.

(3) "Full browsers". Along with the increasing screen sizes, the web browsers of mobile devices are used more and more like the web browsers of laptop and desktop computers. But unfortunately many essential features are still missing. For example, if you see a long code, telephone number, or a web address on a web page, with the default browser of N9 you cannot copy it. And with some browsers it is impossible to copy the target address of a link (the address which you see on the address line is not the same thing when using some advanced web services).

(4) The UI of text selection and Cut/Copy/Paste operations should be improved. When on-line-editing text with the browsers available for N9, it is very difficult or impossible to select text and scroll text up and down. And it is impossible to search for text strings in the contents of the displayed web page. Opera Mobile is an exception: text scrolls correctly up or down, when you move the handles at the ends of the selected text to the top or bottom of the available editing space, which the virtual keyboard makes low. To make editing easier, I don't mind if there were a special editing layer in the virtual keyboard (like that of Swype keyboard), or at least a sticky Ctrl key (about the Ctrl key and other modifier keys you can read in this reply).

(5) Clear and logical UI. The Mozilla-based default browser of N9 is very good in this respect. UI issues are complicated are matters of taste. To please most people, more than one web browser should be available for Sailfish.

I wish that Jolla people read this list. There should be sufficiently advanced features and logical user interface in the most frequetly used applications. Web browser definitely is one of them.

Last edited by Egon; 2013-10-15 at 18:21. Reason: (4) completed: wish an editing layer, link added, added the missing search
 

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