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Mobile browser wars: Nokia microB vs. Firefox FennecPosted on January 2, 2010 by Mikko OhtamaaFiled Under Business, browser, fennec, maemo, mobile, mozilla, n900, nokia Begun, this mobile browser war, has. When mobile internet is growing 8x faster than desktop internet everyone wants to have a share of it. In the core of this fight is the mobile browser – the doorway to the mobile internet. Usually phone comes with a browser from the phone manufacturer: Safari ships with iPhone, Android ships with WebKit based browser and Maemo comes with Nokia microB. Besides the default browser, open platforms have seen third party browsers created for them: Opera Mini has 30 million users and several browsers have been created for Symbian platforms. (Note that iPhone is not really open platform regarding this as Apple developer terms specifically forbid creating alternative browser engines for their Safari – all iPhone “browsers” are just the same Safari with new toppings). Now Mozilla foundation is releasing Firefox Fennec (RC1 version is available for Nokia N900), touted as the most innovative mobile browser this far. New user interface ideas, desktop syncronization and vibrant add-on community are something yet to be seen for mobile browsers. Mozilla did an amazing thing with Firefox when it actually managed to push Internet experience forward and compete against Microsoft’s bundled Internet Explorer with sheer quality. Can Mozilla repeat the same thing it did for desktop browsing for mobile browsing too? Is Fennec good? I installed the release candidate and conducted some tests by visiting on popular sites. It is especially fruitful to compare Fennec against Nokia’s own microB browser as they both are based on the same Gecko rendering engine beneath the hood. The differences of the browsers are, actually surprisingly, not limited to branding and user interface shell. Fennec is portable browser – Mozilla hopes to run Fennec on other mobile platforms beside Maemo in the future. Fennec user interface is based on Mozilla’s XUL library and you can actually run Fennec on your desktop computer too. Nokia’s interest, on the other hand, is have an optimized browser for their own mobile phones: microB user interface is using native Maemo user interface components. Below are some aspects of the browsers compared against each other. Start up time
This is a pain for Fennec. Loading all that XUL Javascript needed to run Fennec is just too much. You really don’t want to start Fennec for a quick browsing session, unless you have the patience of a cow. I am not sure whether N900 keeps microB loaded on the background all the time or what’s causing the difference. User interfaceThis is really where Fennec shines. Nokia enjoys some reputation of being a boring engineer house with little innovation left to stir. After learning the trick of left and right sweep, which is cleverly demostrated on the start page, Fennec user interface instantly feels intuitive. microB, on the other hand, uses somehow clumsy “bottom right corner full-screen button” to access buttons and left-right sweep is not very well thought. For example, switching a tab/browser window takes three “clicks” on microB (show menu – switch application – choose next browser window) when Fennec does it with one sweep and click. Also, backward navigation is much more intuitive on Fennec and takes too many gestures on microB. Both browsers have search integrated to the navigation bar. Fennec start screen is more clever, showing the history and shortcuts, while microB shows only the bookmarks. Fennec navigation bar also is a combination of title and navigation bar, saving the precious screen estate on small physical form factor. Fennec zooms to text fields automatically when you start to input text into them and also have soft “tab keys” to navigate to next and previous input field. Page reading and speedOn sites with above average layout complexity, Fennec is unbearable slow compared to microB, up to the point the browser is next to unusable in its current incarnation. As they both use the same rendering engine, I have hard time to understand how microB manages even the heaviest dynamic pages (Facebook profile page) when Fennec becomes unusable even on a moderate complex page (slashdot.org). The thing with Fennec is that for some of the the time it does not register your interaction and does not have any indicator showing if it is responding – it has grinded to halt, little bit like desktop computer when swapping. And even when Fennec is responding the scrolling of the page refreshment is sluggish compared to microB. This makes the page reading experience unusable. A normal user won’t stand 1-3 second frequent responsivity pauses or page movement which cannot be controlled. microB must do the rendering somehow different - is it hardware acceleration on font rendering, smarter management of images or some other trick?. However, until Fennec reaches the smoothiness of microB, there is no way I would switch to Fennec over microB. (Note: You can press CTRL-Backspace from N900 keyboard to force application switch if you cannot exit from halted Fennec otherwise) Mobile browsingThough N900 has 800 pixel wide screen, it is still a mobile phone. Small physical size, low bandwidth with high latency and limited CPU power might make you to pick a mobile internet version of the site when it is available. However, since the screen has exceptional high Dots-Per-Inch value, this poses a problem for rendering sites with the default font sizes. Fennec does not seem to have a shortcut for setting a large text size. This is something one would hope to see on such high DPI device as the most of the time default web site fonts are too small to be usable. Also, Fennec does not use the shoulder plus and minus volume buttons for zooming – microB does it and it is very natural place for this function. Fennec seems to have some difficulties with mobile site rendering: for example touch.facebook.com and yle.mobi are not scaled to full width. Instead a narrow colum of 1/3 screen width is displayed. BugginessmicroB is very solid piece of software. It crashes more rarely than Safari on iPhone (might this be because of more memory – low memory conditions seem to be a normal crashing condition for Safari?). Fennec is still in its first version and have some issues. (Note: I managed to get Fennec to zombie state – I had to go to terminal and type killall fennec command to make the browser become launchable again). Sites testedSlashdot.org Geek discussion site microB: no problems Fennec: slow, frequent pauses, not smooth scrolling slashdot.org/palm Very simple mobile version of the above. microB: Font too small Fennec: Scales correctly Facebook.com High profile social networking site microB: Sometimes little slow, but seems to work perfectly Fennec: Unusable slow touch.facebook.com microB: Perfect (at least when scaling font up a little) Fennec: Does not scale correctly (default scale uses only 1/3 of screen width, double click zooming scales too much) yle.fi Finnish national broadcasting company site microB: Ok. Readable and usable with text size large. Fennec: Ok. The default view is navigable, but not readable. You need to double-click zoom to read the text (Fennec doesn’t seem to have text size large option)- yle.mobi The mobile version of above. microB: Perfect with text size large, ok otherwise (need to double click to zoom and then click to choose a link to follow). Fennec: Ok – font size too small GMail HTML version The default Javascript version of GMail is too heavy for both the browsers. GMail still provides “Basic HTML” view as the fallback for devices with less CPU power and network bandwidth. microB: Ok – you can do some basic emailing Fennec: Ok. Does not seem to be affected by as much of “slugginess” as other sites are (might the slugginess be a Javascript issue?) Youtube.com The web version of flash based video sharing site. microB: Plays Flash movies ok – smooth scrolling even whilst a Flash movie is playing Fennec: Frequent grinds to halt, sluggish, unusable. Manages to open Flash video, though. m.google.com/youtube The mobile version of above. microB: Youtube claims the browser is unsuppoted Fennec: Cannot enter the site – shows only the page of Youtube Mobile instructions twitter.com (web site) microB: Perfect Fennec: Ok. Sluggish when opening new pages, but still usable. Fennec start view ships with Twitter button, so one might assume this site is well tested for Fennec. m.twitter.com The mobile site of above. microB: Ok – the default font size too small, but when settings text size large works well Fennec: Ok – the default font size too small. Double click zoom does not work well on the twit feed, making reading difficult. plone.org A community site with relatively simple layout. microB: Ok – minor rendering errors Fennec: Ok – minor rendering errors iltalehti.fi Finnish tabloid web site with lots of images. microB: Ok Fennec: Grinds to halt, unusable slow SummaryThough having nice promise of innovation, the advise for Fennec development team would be “back to the basics”. The slugginess and response times of Fennec are such an issue that one would not yet consider it as an real alternative for Nokia’s default microB browser. With Fennec’s user interface and microB’s speed one could have a near perfect mobile browser. Depending what kind of future co-operation Nokia and Mozilla foundation will have, we might live to see it. Designing a high usability Plone themePosted on September 12, 2008 by Mikko OhtamaaFiled Under Plone (old) This is my brain dump of instructions for artists how to design good Plone themes. I hope I can receive some comments, some feedback from the artists itself and then publish this as a plone.org tutorial. Often external artist is used to design a site theme. Artists might or might not have seen Plone, artists might or might not have any basic usability know how. This article should explain the elements which “must be there” to make a match between the theme and Plone easily. The basic layoutThis document describes the elements of multilingual high usability Plone theme. It is based on fluid div layout, meaning that the content stays very readable on small screens or when CSS is not loaded (screen readers). See the example layout. The layout must not break down when user is using non-default font size. E.g. all element accept two rows text, even if the default case is usually one row. Plone layoutHere we are designing a “normal” site theme where Plone is used to publish textual content for external readers. This might not always be the case – for example if Plone is used as a professional tool one might want to use all available screen space to display as much as possible action shortcuts to make the tool to quick to use. The latter is actual case I have seen in medical applications. Plone layout is formed by seven main parts.
The layout must be designed so that
Alternative layout casesThe layout must be formed from such a blocks that left or right portlets can be easily dropped without breaking the layout. Right portlets missing:
Both portlets missing (front page view):
Header elementsThe header should have the following elements
The header must scale between 780 – 1280 px. Section navigation tabs may trigger drop down menus, see http://www.jyu.fi/ Content area elementsThe content area contains
The whole portlet section can be dropped, making space for the content. PortletsPortlets are boxes on the left and right side of the content containing section specific actions. Example portlets:
The portlet consists of
See http://www.siggraph.org/ for creative use of portlets. Footer elementsThe footer has
The footer must scale between 780 – 1280 px. Complete picture
Special casesThese are often required and might shoot you into a foot
ColorsPlone uses mechanism to have color variables in CSS. See base_properties.prop to get an idea what colors there are and try to guess how they are used. IconsPlone uses generic icon mechanism to apply icons to any action available on site. Icons are 16×16, transparent with one pixel transparent border leaving 14×14 pixels for the content. The icons should preferably be suitable for dark and light backgrounds. This might be hard to achieve, though, so it is suitable to use ligh background icons, since this is the Plone default. Actions
Language flagsPlone default flags can be used
Content iconsThese reflect different Plone content types
Link iconsPlone uses Javascript to apply special icons for external links
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Symbian digging its own grave with symbiansigned.comPosted on March 14, 2008 by Mikko OhtamaaFiled Under mobile, signing, symbian Edit: Made correction to iPhone SDK price/added self-signed option I have been recently involved in Symbian development. Unfortunately, I could say. Symbian has made the life of Symbian developers headacheful. The main problem is that the application signing is made unnecessary cumbersome. Getting a required developer certificate to just to run your one liner test code is a long road paved with curses, stress and ponder how a world class company can screw up things so badly. I write this post to vent out the frustration. Hopefully someone picks up the feedback presented here. Personally, I don’t care anymore really. After explaining to the customer once “I am afraid that we cannot have the demo in this meeting, since we were unable to get the developer certificates in time. It was nice you did summon all of your executes, though.” my sympathy towards Symbian has fallen to zero. In the long run, I believe, this will hurt Symbian when developers leave the platform. When this happens Symbian will miss 1) developer base 2) the wow value of all new cool things when hackers move to happier platforms – after all you don’t want to work with things causing a headache even if you are paid generously. Professional Symbian capable developers are already rare and scaring away the potential candidates (students, open source developers, freeware developers) won’t really help the matter. Of course, for us, who are already in the business, it’s good since we can raise our hourly fee and die as rich dinosaurs (remember COBOL). Looks like the root problem is the cocky attitude: “We are the biggest mobile operating system in the world. You are not our customer, the biggest mobile phone brands are. Thus, you are an insignicant fly and we don’t need to listen to you. Please go away.” The big boys tell that this very same reason lead to Motorola’s fall from the number one mobile phone vendor position – so let’s see if the history is repeating itself. The problems of Symbian development process, especially signing, are well known. Symbian Signed forum category has 120 000 views. Symbian signed support requests has 57 000 views and 2000 messages, since November 2007. Over a thousand support requests in four months. Symbian has money. It could fix the problem if it has will. If there is will in the organization and the work just does not progress, the corporate world has a simple solution: fire the management and hire capable responsible persons. I won’t go the details of the problems in this post. I have prepared a post containing over 50 bulletins with detailed steps to get the developer certification process done and it lists every little mistake in Symbian Signed process. Unsurprisingly, the post mentions fuck and hell over twenty times, so I am reluctant to post it on our company site. So I sketched a manager comprehensible overview of the state of the process in this post. To justify my criticism, I compare Symbian to Apple iPhone and make some suggestion how to fix things. Certificate costsSymbian: 200$/1.5 years (you need a publisher id to get a developer certificate) + 20$ per signing round Update: You can still make self-signing certificates yourself with limited capabilities (no GPS), but symbiansigned.com doesn’t bother to mention it. Apple: 99$/year (for testing and distribution applications) Suggestion: Make the developer certificate free. It used to be free, but based on this post, Symbian signed claims that they do not have enough CPU power, because of all kind of nasties are knocking their server. Come on! it’s Internet. You are hosted by Cidercone and by knowing how much they charge for the hosting I believe you can get every possible server power in the world to generate your keys. This development start up cost automatically excludes third world people, freeware makers and students i.e. the future Symbian professionals. It’s hard to maintain a platform if there is not enough skilled people to work with it. There won’t be meat into Nokia’s and Sony-Ericsson’s innovation machines. Development start lead timeHow long it takes to get “Hello World” code to the phone. Symbian: 8 workdays Apple: 6 hours Complete Guide to Symbian Signed guide (manual) is 20 pages PDF. How often you need a user manual to use a web site? Even with this page amount, the manual lacks crucial pieces of information which you need to hunt and ask help from the Symbian Signed support forums. I had to make 3 support request for Symbian Signed and 1 for TrustCenter. Set-up processSymbian: Create 3 user accounts (symbiansigned.com, developers.symbian.com, TrustCenter). Fax your passport and some signed papers to TrustCenter Germany. Wait when your request is manually processed. Ask TrustCenter what I do with the link they send me (hint: the only working web browser for their site is the very same browser you orignally submitted your application from). Convert TrustCenter key to Symbian specific format using obscure BAT tool. Use half-baked Windows EXE to generate files. Ask at the support forums permission to be allowed to create the Publisher id. Apple: Download SDK. Click “I Agree.” Symbiansigned management team must be either incomplete or inexistent, or they just hate their users. Looks like no one didn’t bother model or test this process, since the flaws are so apparent. Why do we need three user accounts? Why do we need a user account at all, isn’t my credit card payment enough? Why there can’t be a single web page on symbiansigned.com where I could do these all things without? Also, Symbian could do these things without third parties (TrustCenter) who are badly integrated to the process. Web site and information reachabilitySymbian: Two sites with different user accounts. Information is spread around and hidden behind various for registred users only pages. Often Symbian PDFs (yes they seem to prefer zipped PDFs) and web pages cross-link to other sites and these links are broken. Their internal site search engine does not give meaningful results. Google cannot search pages, since they are hidden behind the registration. Web forms don’t work. Navigation paths are unclear and you often need to guess where a certain piece of information could be. Apple: One site – and it just works. Why Symbian hides a crucial BAT tool in the page labyrinth of developers.symbian.com and behind login? Does the 100 lines of BAT code contains a very hidden trade secret? I doubt. (I also doubt that a BAT tool is a good way to solve a problem which could be fixed with a web form or Javascript, but that’s another matter.) I think this is the part of the attidude problem. SymbianSigned.com mission is not to “secure” the development and control the developers of the platform. It’s mission should be easily enable developers to start development and release their software for Symbian. The meaning of “easily” includes that the web site is working and up to the standards. Please hire a usability expert (we are here) and get it fixed. This problem is not solvable by writing yet-another user manual PDF. Giving feedbackSymbian: Support like goes to the Symbian developer forum. A bulleting board with unorganized, angry, posts. They don’t give a feedback form to report the problems on Symbian Signed. Apple: “There are three great ways to get answers to your questions about ADC membership, products, and services: visit our Frequently Asked Questions web pages, submit your questions or feedback using the form below, or call us to speak directly to a worldwide support agent. We look forward to assisting you.” I’d help symbiansigned.com to get its site better if I could. When there is a broken link, I can hit feedback and ask them to fix it. But looks like they want to be ignorant about the matter – if I report a problem on their forum I bet no one will ever fix it. There won’t be even “thank you.” Probably no one ever reads my post. On the other hand, when having such non-functional service, this feedback channel would be flooded in overnight. ConclusionSymbian has unforgiveable screwed up with its signing process and doesn’t seem to get the feedback from the developers who suffer from it. Steve Ballmer’s famous quote “developers, developers, developers” refer to what’s the important factor making the platform succesfully in long term. This is especially crude when you know that things used to be good. |
