Latest revision as of 07:03, 12 April 2011

N900 Developer Edition Browser alternatives study

Target is to to decide if we use Fennec or some other alternative as the main browser in N900 Meego Developer Edition.

Alternatives and comments Please add ideas, finding, and new alternatives here

• Fennec
  • Good mobile UI
  • Good rendering performance
  • Current startup time bad >30sec

• Tablet UX browser
  • Not yet open => unknown if it can be easily taken into use
  • Schedule unclear
  • Chromium is already in meego upstream, and built for ARM afaik (Jukka)

• QMLDemobrowser
  • Minimal => no features
  • Probably fast (needs to be checked

• Orange Mobile Browser
  • https://github.com/OrangeLabsUK/OrangeMobileBrowser#readme
  • Experimental
  • After adjusting the proxy configuration, orange mobile browser (omb) builds and works on both n900 target and ia32-desktop target.
  • Ordinary static web sites are rendered fine (it claims HTML5 supports)
  • works only in landscape.
  • Heavy javascript sites like Google Map are also rendered though it's pretty slow and some buttons don't work. The omb's touch ui seems to be conflicting with the Google Map's grab scroll and does not work fine.
  • GMail did work on desktop target but didn't on n900 for some reason (maybe platform issues?). Meaning https, cookies etc seem to work.
  • Accepting non-preauthorized certificate do not work, there is no such feature.
  • YouTube (both video and audio) _works_ on desktop target, was not checked on n900.
  • Double clicking zoom-in/out work in somehow weird manner?
  • Displaying non ascii characters like Japanese works.
  • performance: launch time is around 6-8 sec on n900, under 5s with few tweaks and booster. However, compared with qt-fancybrowser (which is more like bare qt-webkit), orange mobile browser is slower. I mean, fancybrowser's scroll bar works much reliable than omb's touch ui. (again, the corresponding mouse grab action works fine on desktop target)
  • Features: home, backward/forward, histories, bookmarks, feedreader that's it. The feedreader does not seem to be flexible... fetching feeds only from omb site?
  • Conclusion: not good enough as a main browser but might be good to bundle as a stripped simple browser option.

• Opera 11
  • http://labs.opera.com/news/2011/03/22/

Unsuitable alternatives

• Dooble Web Browser
  • http://dooble.sourceforge.net/

• Let's write a new browser

• Chromium (the OLD one)
  • Tried out the old Chromium browser (chromium-11.0.678.0-10.1.armv7l.rpm), i.e. the one made before the Tablet UX activity
    • OBS project
    • RPM package
  • Used MeeGo image: meego-handset-armv7l-n900-1.1.99.0.20110325.2-mmcblk0p.raw
  • Needed to install a couple of additional packages
    • sound-theme-freedesktop-0.7-2.4.noarch.rpm, libcanberra-0.25-1.25.armv7l.rpm, libcanberra-gtk2-0.25-1.25.armv7l.rpm, libXScrnSaver-1.2.0-3.18.armv7l.rpm
  • Experiences
    • The UI looks like, well, the Chromium UI on PC
      • Not optimized for smallish screen, finger usage
      • Works only in landscape orientation
      • Uses Gtk widgets (menus, dialogs, scroll bars etc.) that look pretty ugly
    • Generally a bit unstable
      • Crashes, drawing problems every now and then
    • Performance
      • Startup time around 15-20 s on first start, 5-10 s on subsequent starts
      • But performance otherwise somewhat sluggish
    • Other observations
      • Logging on the WANO guest network did not succeed
        • Worked OK with Fennec though
  • Summary
    • Would mean quite a lot of work to make this option appealing => better to check other alternatives

Target is to conclude the alternative in the weekly meeting at 2011-04-15