Web browsing is 80% of what I do several times every day with my N800 running OS2008, and for the most part the experience is equal to or better than what I get using Firefox in Mac OSX or Ubuntu or XP, apart from the obvious miniature-display factor on the N800. And it's much better than OS2007 in many ways, from Gmail/Gcal and Google Reader to the Greasemonkey scripts and generally smooth Youtube performance. Maybe there are some bum units with hinky installs out there, but from my perspective the title of this thread is just dumb as rocks.

I prefer microb to opera, but zooming doesn't work on the pages where I most need it (note that I filed a bug report for it, but it's not enough to get it fixed it seems).

Officially, no comment on IE7. FF2 and I have a love/hate relationship, and I'm not even going to touch FF3.

I just miss two things: one, the proper handling of the d-pad. I liked being able to browse pages lynx/links/elinks/you get the idea-style: jump from link to link where available, and scroll if there are no links. On my MicroB with pages with no links, the d-pad does nothing on short presses. Along these lines, I also find a lot of pages where some links can't be hit with the d-pad --- no combination of presses reaches an element --- and some pages with lists of items where one item can only be accessed going down, or going up. Left and Right / Up and Down should always, always switch between the same two elements...

I also notice I can have no more than three windows open. Four almost inevitably causes a crash, three bogs down the system, two is ok only if I'm not running anything else. Even with one window open, if I'm running Skype and a notepad, I'm pushing the limit of what I'd call acceptable response time. Opera handled five or more without complaint.

Yes, JS-heavy sites work when they didn't before, likewise Flash 9-sites: however, I find JS and Flash performance so slow that I browse with it off. No real gain there.

Adblock causes dramatic startup slowdowns for me, takes multiple seconds per click when being configured, and adds a second or two to each pageload. I guess I don't use ad-heavy sites?

I didn't think of playing with the about:config settings, good call, let's see if they help as much as they did with FF 1.5

Talk about damning with faint praise.

All this said, I'm still the envy of my Windows Mobile-toting friends, and even some of the iPhone fans are blown away by flash working, even if it's slow.

/me waves his marshalling wands in the direction of bugzilla.

Ad-blocking css and hosts files are a lot more efficient (and, sometimes, effective) than Ad Block Plus.

my two pence - the new browser freezes on me a lot. Also gets stuck on downloading say 32 items of 35 or something. then freezes and is impossible to close.

also some site (myspace for instance) are so slow to load as to be unusable.

The "fit to width" feature previously very useful for sites such as BBC News now messes the layouts of the page overall.

the default font seems smaller.

i certainly don't find the improvements others are talking about here.

I take it that you are a part of the browser team? If so, thanks for your feedback.

I run FF3b2 on a 400mhz pentium2 box; I think my frame of reference for browser speed is a good one

I was not aware that so much about the extensions was gui related. Thanks for that as well.

That's strange: to counter the slowness in loading the pages, I regularly open links in a new page, go back to the original window, then I go to the new pages once they are completely loaded.
While browsing this forum (edit: with the classic skin) I usually pile up 10 or more windows with no apparent problems.

No, sir. Just a regular old forum troll.

No doubt!

And lately, when IE7 crashes (often) on my laptop, a system reboot is required to make it work right again. I haven't had to do that after my three microB crashes on OS2008.

I like the new browser. It works on Pandora, which is an achievement. I've been able to use it on every site I've tried. If I have ad-block enabled, then some pages won't load, but when I disable it, they load fine.