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
  • First experiments: startup about 5s on Meego N900. scrolling quite fast. works only in landscape. Potential is there. We could make quick minibrowser with small modifications. More investigation needed.

• 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