Not to put words in his mouth, but I think that GA's point is more that comparing a freshly released Fennec/Minefield build to the browser that's been on our tablet's since... December(?) isn't particularly instructive about the relative efficiency or general "goodness" of the browsers themselves. Yes, we can look at them and say "Fennec/Minefield is faster" but we should try not to get too caught up in it and become "indoctrinated" to that idea (for lack of a better word) or believe it's due to some inherent superiority of the way Fennec/Minefield are coded. The release cycles are so badly out of sync that (to use a bit of hyperbole) it's like you're comparing Windows 2000 to Mac OS 9 back in February of 2001. Sure, one might be faster or better now, but let's not jump to conclusions and abandon ship just yet.
On the other hand, nothing wrong with using it if you like it - consider it the benefit of an open platform. What we probably don't want, however, is to get too worked up about it and have people pushing for Nokia to switch browsers again before we see what they've done with MicroB.
Just look at my discussion with Bundyo - software can change a lot over the course of a release cycle. This is even more true when that release cycle is dependent on multiple other projects.
Does anyone know if there is a browser like NetFront or Universe for the N800?
The improvements with MicroB are nice, but it will never be able to significantly shrink it's footprint to anywhere near the levels of NetFront or Universe because it's still, at it's heart, a desktop web browser.
My biggest problem with the N-series web browsers is that they need more memory than the N-series have in order to run efficiently.
All it takes is a web page with lots of pictures or a few large SWFs and the whole thing crawls to a halt.
Ah, I get you -- but that doesn't discount that today the fastest available browsers on the IT's is Fennec/Minefield. For those using a browser for anything meaningful it is worth knowing that Fennec/Minefield is worth checking out for the speed & memory gains over the current microb. This MAY change in the future when Diablo MicroB is released; but Today and for the a while into the future Fennec/Minefield are on the top of the heap. ;-)
Nathan.
While it is very good to say Fennec right now is THE fastest browser for ther NIT, that does not go to say that FENNEC is the BEST stable browset for the NIT today.
FENNEC is no where near complete - crashes out often on large sites (which MicroB handles), kinetic scrolling only works on lite sites and on heavy sites (moderately) there is no way to even scroll up or down since they removed the scrollbars.
Installation memory footprint seems to be pretty big (i doont know about MicroB since its baked in into the OS).
So lets not make such definitive statements here. In fact Fennec/Minefield is stil not a ready app in the true sense. I installed it and had to uninstakll it if I really want a usable browser on my NIT.
Right now it is MicroB, sadly with its shortcomings.
My biggest problem with the N-series web browsers is that they need more memory than the N-series have in order to run efficiently.
All it takes is a web page with lots of pictures or a few large SWFs and the whole thing crawls to a halt.
If you literally mean "to a halt" that can be fixed with certain tweaks. My microb used to do that, but not anymore. It loads any page I throw at it. At worst it takes a while (I don't know, maybe 15 seocnds sometimes) and sometimes to display just right I need to hit reload. I have it always in "Fit width to view" (which slows things down), but as a result it all shows up within the horizontal confines of my screen.
My tweaks include userContent.css, about:config changes, flash block, enabling virtual memory, and a one-time addition to the hosts file (for ad-blocking). Most of the first two types come from brontide.
That said, yeah, faster would be nicer. It always is.
Looking forward to seeing what Diablo's MicroB can do, and hopefully seeing Diablo's in-place updates eventually give us better and better versions as Gecko and MicroB are optimized and improved.
Understood that MicroB will be using a more recent engine and, I guess, at one point will have the same engine as Fennec.
Will that bring XUL support too?
Or, putting my concerns slightly differently: Will MicroB and Fennec then have equal XUL and Javascript capabilities?
