Notices

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.

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.

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

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).

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.

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).

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

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.

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

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.