Notices

Ok, here is the wmlbrowser plugin.

It's based on Oleg Romashin work for packaging it up for microb here.
https://garage.maemo.org/svn/browser...wser-webaddon/



Diablo only.

Many thanks for the deb, which installs perfectly. Now I can use the Tablet to read some more wap sites. No luck with http://wap.ratp.fr though, even though it works on PC when Firefox has wmlbrowser enabled. Is that a difference between v.20 on Firefox and v.18 on MicroB, or is there something else going on?

ratp.fr shows the usefulness of mobile sites. http://www.ratp.fr suffers from the bloat that Fragos deplores in http://www.internettablettalk.com/fo...5&postcount=25 . I can get info about public transport in Paris from the wap site via EDGE to phone in about half the time it takes from the www via DSL to PC. It would be even faster and smoother via EDGE and BT to Tablet if I could get it.

(These sites can save a traveller to Paris from a lot of misery. When they have one of their transport strikes, there are always some lines left running. The web and wap sites give accurate info about the remaining service, and you can find a route to somewhere near where you want to go. Wap is preferable for speed and to avoid high costs of mobile roaming. This is a bit different from the Youtube addiction which seems to dominate the forums here.)

Correction - and my apologies to the developers of http://www.ratp.fr ! That website is loading much more quickly than I remember, particularly on N770 connected to WLAN, now that I have 48MHz kernel working.

However, my point about mobile sites is that the Tablets are perfect for arranging alternate travel plans while on the move, when original plans fall through. Sometimes this means accessing the full website. (I am delighted that OS2008HE allows me into ticket-purchasing systems of Easyjet and Trenitalia, among others - not possible on OS2006.) Other times, to save on expensive roaming data, the mobile site is preferable. The mobile site often displays info much more clearly than the full website, with fewer extraneous distractions; this makes a big difference when you are getting panicky about missed flights, etc. http://www.ratp.fr is still a good illustration of that last point: it takes a lot of zooming and scrolling on the 90mm x 55mm screen to pick out the info you need from their very full web pages.

While mobile pages can be read on a phone's browser, the Tablet makes it much easier and they load much faster. These are reasons why Tablet owners (this one, anyway) would want to use their tablets to read mobile pages. All the more thanks to Qwerty12 for helping us do it. Some senior members have objected to the very idea of reading mobile pages on the Tablets and have wondered why anyone would want to rotate the screen by 90 deg. This junior member finds good reasons to do both.

If you restart tablet-browser-daemon this can be uploaded to Extras-Devel or Garage?

I don't really bother with Garage (not because I doubt its usefulness but because I'm lazy). But that said, if you really want it in extras-devel. I could package it up properly and upload there.

Thank well, you see, people want these plugins for MicroB... but if its not in the repositories, its harder for them to find... so if you have some free time.

My problem with the browser-extras Garage entry is that several entries are incompatible with each other. So I'm tending to stay away from it completely...

Uploaded wmlbrowser to diablo extras. Updated it to 0.7.20 and made some other changes. I make sure that the extension cache is recreated when the browser is next opened again and I give the user the choice of restarting tablet-browser-daemon.

See the first post for install link.

Hi qwerty12. I have a question regarding the wmlbrowser plug-in. Firstly, thank you for a wonderful plug-in. Is there any way you can tweak it so that one can force wml mode? or perhaps to separate it so that the wmlbrowser can run as a stand alone wap-only browser?
I am asking because many sites, most notably Google Mobile, automatically go to their normal pages when they detect the capability to handle the page normally. I have found that it is at times far more efficient to go to wml sites that it is to go to html sites even if the N810 can handle it.
Many thanks in advance for any help on this.

Are you sure that "Google Mobile" is the name of a site? There is an application of that name, and there are sites that let you download the app for iPhone, Blackberry, Android, WM etc., but apparently not for Maemo. What is the URL of the site you would like to access?

Are you looking for a low-bandwidth search page? There are two slightly different mobile versions of the Google search page, at http://www.google.com/wml and http://www.google.com/xhtml . Both of these load through the MicroB browser with wmlbrowser enabled. Making a search for "buffalo weather" using http://www.google.com/wml , there was a combined upload and download of 30.5 kB for the search page and the first page of results. (That included a four-day weather forecast.) This compares with 48 kB for the first page of results, using the Google desktop applet. The difference is not spectacular.

The web page you eventually select will require the same data transfer as it would if accessed directly (unlike the situation with a mobile phone browser, which receives a reduced download via Google's wml proxy). You could include the word "mobile" in your keywords, and then the search might return some mobile URL's. If you are lucky, those mobile pages will load on MicroB. No guarantee, though.

The mobile versions of google are available in the same national variants as the full-size search page. For example, if you are searching for web pages that are mainly of interest to people in Germany, you would use http://www.google.de/wml .


You are right in pointing out that many mobile sites either refuse to load or redirect you to the full-size site when they encounter the MicroB browser. Interestingly, this problem seems to be disappearing. Several mobile sites have been rewritten so that they do now load on MicroB, even though they did not in the past. A case in point is http://wap.ratp.fr/, the site I mentioned in an earlier post of this thread. It now works perfectly on MicroB, even without the wmlbrowser plugged in. This seems to be a side-effect of the iPhone hype, making site developers aware that there are intermediate devices whose users sometimes prefer to economise on bandwidth.

There is another helpful result of this increased awareness. More businesses and organizations are offering a full range of services on their mobile sites, which they did not in the past. Again, a site I mentioned previously is a good example. It is now possible to buy tickets and change reservations on the Italian train operator Trenitalia's mobile site. Until a few months ago, the mobile site could only be used for looking up timetables. This mobile site also loads on MicroB. (It always did, but now there is more reason to load it.)

The best solution would be an adaptation of Fennec for Maemo. This has been done, but apparently it does not work very well as yet.