Can I just chime in here and relate my experiences with feedback from newbies...

Fit Width To View is off by default on current tablets, but newbies would switch it on when they first got their tablet, and then forget about it completely.

They then visited websites which didn't work well with FWTV, in fact some of them were downright awful (see below).

Because FWTV didn't give any warning about potentially severe distortion to sites, the newbies had no idea that FWTV was the problem. And when they came to ask for help, I didn't know it was the problem either because the same sites loaded fine on my tablet. It was only when someone else on ITT suggested FWTV as the culprit that the whole mystery was solved.

And how many newbies even bother to ask about this kind of problem? How many assume it's just an innate problem with the hardware?

The newbies often assumed the browser itself was just a piece of crap and dismissed their purchase of a tablet as a mistake. Some assumed because the tablet was made by Nokia, that this was some kind of simple java phone browser which was only intended for very simple mobile sites, and that it couldn't cope with proper websites.

Just to show how badly wrong FWTV could go, see the attachment at the end of this post. The normal site took 5 to 10 seconds to load, while the FWTV version took 30+ seconds to load (and never really loaded properly either).

IIRC this was raised in bugzilla, and the result of that discussion was a list of five possible options:

Option 1) Do absolutely nothing, let newbies think they've wasted their money on a piece of crap.

or

Option 2) If FWTV is on, have a dialogue box warn people about FWTV being on every time they start up the browser, saying that it may cause sites to be distorted and slow, and giving them the option of switching it off. That way no newbie could ever blame the general browser for problems that are specific to FWTV

or

Option 3) Bury FWTV much much further down into the menu system, so that only people who really know what they're doing are likely to access it, and have a dialogue box warning during activation saying that FWTV may make websites very distorted and slow.

or

Option 4) Remove FWTV completely

or

Option 5) Make FWTV switch off after every browsing session, so people are forced to consciously switch it on before using it. That way, if a site does go bad in FWTV the user will be much more likely to realise that FWTV is what is causing the problems. The risk there is that regular users will think the automatic switch-off is a bug.


Personally I would go for options 3 or 4.