I've just spent 21 hours testing the Beta version of the 770's default browser, and so far it's showing to be more unstable than previous versions. I'm sure Nokia will have some of the issues worked out before the real release.

Issues I've noticed so far:

1) when pasting URL's into a new window, if you copy an extra space before the URL, Opera isn't smart enough to omit the space, instead returning a 'no such web address' or 'invalid structure' error.

2) Memory bleeds occassionally when you use the slider bar along the right side to scroll the page up and down. About 35% of the time when using the slider bar, my system freezes. 35% when I close and open more than 10 windows in a short span of time (I
will admit, a harsh test, but someone could try to use their system that hard for real) it freezes my system. I leave the other 35% to mystery, cause who can really say they honestly know why it crashes every time?

3) The crashes currently happen way too often. The system crashes waaay too hard also, becoming totally unresponsive no matter how long or hard you mash the Off key. Forced to take the battery out to affect a reboot or restart. During a harsh period of testing, say two hours of opening and clicking on random links with 2-4 windows open at any given time, I might have a freeze leading to a battery beig pulled nearly 6-10 times an hour. Waaay too unstable for more than 1-2 windows, which is good enough for 80% of users, but not power users like myself.

4) There is a new system that tries to inform the user when the system is becoming unreponsive and allow us to close Opera; however, in my experience it only works on 1 in 6 crashes, AND only after waiting for 3-5 minutes, which is twice the time it takes merely to pull the battery out and restart it. Nice idea; I'm sure it will improve in time.

5) The Clipboard doesn't work upon Opera shutdown. In the old version 2005, whatever text you copied was still there if you closed the browser and reloaded it. That feature needs to be readded, it is crucial on many occassions to have the text you copied just before your buggy browser crashed.

6) I would like to see a time-saving feature added: "Open selection as a URL." If we highlight a bit of text that is supposed to be a URL, but isn't active, we should be able to press down, and just under the 'copy' option in the window that pops up would be this option. When clicked, Opera would open a new window and try to use the selected text like it is a URL, and just go there. No selecting, copying, opening our own window, stopping the default window from loadin while we attempt to paste our text into that long URL window only to have our current window arrive and overwrite our paste efforts. . . . . just BLAM . . . all in one simple operation.

7) Opera really neeeds to remember the last location we saved our images, etc . . . . so when we're on a roll, we can just keep saving them quickly. Every time we go to save a picture or file now, it defaults to Images or Documents . . . very frustating.

8) We need more lower screen scaling options besides 80%. Let choose up to 4 different % for our own tastes, call them UD-1 thru UD-4. (UD=user defined.)

9) I love the Password-saving feature, and it works flawlessly. Nothing to say about it, woohoo!

10) History doesn't update very well at the moment. Sometimes some things I just visited are there, but mostly they are not. I once browsed for two hours without a single crash (and ONLY once) and when I rebooted, none of those URL's was in my History... I couldn't find my way back to where I had finally gotten. It was atrocious. All that time lost cause the History doesn't update frequently enough. Maybe some people prefer it that way, I'm only asking for a choice... a setting we can invoke to our own wills.

11) Secure sites are no problem now (my 770 couldn't use them at all, no matter what update I went to except this Beta one, finally)...Great job, no changes.

This is all I can remember for now. If you can think of something to add, please DO.... we'll hope a Dev from Nokia sees this, since there are too many bugs here for me to deal with in Bugzilla for the moment.

Thanks for your time.

Excellent review. Everything you stated happens the exact same way on mine. I also agree with each of your improvement ideas for the browser. Let's hope a lot of the bugs get fixed and some useful features are added as well.

Great job. Now go to http://maemo.org/community/bugs.html and enter this info there.

I have reported this as you asked, Kimmoj. Bug # 643.

Thanks for the spur, heh (wink). I needed that.

Later.

Well, now you'll always have that warm and fuzzy feeling knowing you've helped out in making the 2006 OS that much more stable.

Two more bugs in Opera:

1) When I have two windows open and I'm selecting a portion of a URL I want to paste into the 2nd window in order to go to a site, upon switching to the other window and tapping in the URL window in order to paste the copied URL, Opera promptly crashes. This happens 20% of the times I tap in the URL window. It happens immediately upon clicking in the URL window.

2) When downloading a large video, the screen fades to black. I wish it would not do this during downloads at all, but if we HAVE to have our screen fade, then the other part of the bug is that after you wake it up from the faded screen, it no longer correctly reports the % complete of the download. It starts up from where it showed on the screen after it went to sleep. So if it stopped at 5% but actually downloaded 64%, when you wake it up, it only says 5%, and then starts counting again from there. We have no way to know exactly
how long the download will take at that point, leading to frustration. It
needs to remember % complete even if the screen goes black, but I really wish you'd make an option to "turn off screensaver during downloads" as long we leave the download window up and active, anyway.

These have been added to my Bugzilla report at

https://maemo.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=634

P.S. In my first post above, item #2 I wrote the following: "I leave the other 35% to mystery, cause who can really say they honestly know why it crashes every time?" I would like to amend that now. The OTHER 35% of the time that it crashes is when you click the Stop button on a long website that keeps downloading tons of stuff. When you interrupt the long website's never-ending sprawl down the page by hitting the Stop button (X), the system freezes up, and if you have CPU/MEM load AW utility on, you can then watch the red bar slowly creep up the right side for about 30 seconds until it reaches Full Red and you are then fubar'd and must pull the battery. I'm glad I found that other crash... I knew I was forgetting it... but it happens soooo often, I was bound to be reminded, heh.