MicroB ships as the official browser for IT OS 2008

Some people may have noticed, but I'm confirming it for everyone else: MicroB has shipped as the only (and hence default...) browser with IT OS 2008.

I'd like to say this is a win for open source. MicroB is the engine used by /usr/bin/browser on IT OS and it is based on Mozilla Gecko.

There are some high points and some low points for this release.

Good news

1. The default start page is now useful. Many thanks to Kevin Zhang, Tuukka Tolvanen, disq, and TPC for helping with the page. Thanks to Alicia Patterson, John Lilly, and others at mozilla.org for the art work. Thanks to Erkko Anttila and again to Jorma Virkkunen for letting us fix up the page.
2. The Browser default plug-in has been renamed to Default plug-in, RealPlayer, Windows Media and the description has been changed to Default plug-in. Supports RealPlayer and Windows Media. Because of this, you can now load BBC News Video, Radio, and French TV stations, e.g., France2. Thanks to Marc-Andre Lureau for complaining about this. Thanks also to Jens Wilke who has been helping us investigate web compatibility and get fixes to Nokia properties for MicroB.
3. There is a project to help enhance MicroB, called browser-extras which is busy porting and packaging content and extensions to improve your browsing experience as well as reduce the pressure on our in house developers. Thanks to their contributors there for settings it up and working on it.

Bad news

1. If you like Yahoo! Music (which includes Music Videos), or many Internet Radio stations (e.g., ABC Radio affiliate WMAL630 in Washington, D.C.), you will unfortunately get an error from Media player when you try to use it. Yahoo's content supports at last Windows Media and Flash plug-ins. Yahoo's content also properly favors Windows Media. Unfortunately the Media player does not properly support ASF playlist files unless their file extension is .asf. In order to listen to Yahoo content, you will have to disable the Default Plug-in. To do that:
   1. Open the application menu > View > Show toolbar. Make sure the toolbar is visible for the mode you're in (Full screen / Normal screen). -- Yes, I just noticed that "Normal screen" appears in the user interface. This is the least of my language worries, I am quite embarrassed by the quality of the text.
   2. Click the bottom right button in the toolbar (it looks like a magnifying glass, but it's really an overloaded kitchen sink button) > Components > Default plug-in, RealPlayer, Windows Media.
   3. Try loading your Yahoo media property again. You should now get Flash based media delivery.
2. We're now using Nokia sponsored text for all languages, including English US and English GB. In the betas we shipped Mozilla's text for English. This is a very mixed bag. Unfortunately it meant that we didn't get very good testing coverage of the text we're shipping. And it really shows in a number of places. I take the blame for this. It meant that our beta testers could test the engine as the localizations we were given were generally so broken that you, e.g. got a famous yellow/red error indicating Gecko couldn't render the error page when you could not reach your proxy. Unfortunately the localizers are not familiar with localizing XML text and consistently generated text which was invalid, and until the very end we didn't have any tools to help them recognize this problem. Next time, they'll hopefully do better. There are two main places where you will notice this, again, I'm sorry. We will try to ship a beta release which fixes the text shortly. I haven't decided if we'll release back ports for the other platforms in sync with this fix or before we fix this.
   1. The HTTPS authentication dialogs repeat the server and message in both the server and message fields (oops). This was not present in any of our betas, so I didn't notice it while I was traveling with my devices last month.
   2. The netError messages don't fit Nokia style, specifically the line below the title should really show just the site/path, and not text.

What's coming?

We have a number of long term projects;

• Upgrading Gecko to a more current version, which will probably include switching to using Cairo throughout Gecko instead of just for <canvas>.
• Betas and backports. Hopefully within a week of the IT OS 2008 image being posted I'll be able to announce packaged versions for all the other platforms for which we've shipped betas, as well as OS2007HE. There is a package available, but I felt that its quality was not up to snuff (yes, I know the package I'm announcing here isn't perfect, but what I saw when I first opened it was more glaring and it wasn't the current version at the time). We'll try to keep all of our releases in sync so that we don't have to deal with people complaining about bugs in one system and having people with a different system say that they don't see the bug (when the reason would have been because one of the versions was newer).

Changes

This is a list of changes since 4, to the best of my ability. Please remember that there have been occasional updates since that announcement, and as I have not had time to review or publish the announcements, there is no specific changelog for them, which means you may not remember some of these bugs. Note that I'm only reviewing changelogs for browser related packages, it's possible that bugs affecting browser have been fixed in packages upon which the browser depends. There's no easy way for me to learn about such things.

I'm assuming that changes happened after August 9, 2007.

User reported bugs

• Selecting part of the url field while vkb is hidden triggers vkb which selects the entire string. making a selection in url field while vkb is hidden triggers vkb which selects the entire string
• The vkb should be usable when the toolbar is hidden. Keyboard will not stay open/up with toolbar hidden
• link navigation should be triggered by key-up not key-down and only if scrolling isn't triggered

Multimedia

• Default plug-in now includes mime type when it sends content to handlers, this fixes problems with RealPlayer audio samples from amazon.com. Note: This requires the Media player to register the content types (Editor believes this is fixed in IT OS 2008 on the Media player side, people trying to take advantage of this fix with MicroB on older releases will probably need to hack a .desktop file).
• Content of type application/x-mplayer2 should be supported (editor believes this is fixed in IT OS 2008 on the Media player side, people trying to take advantage of this fix with MicroB on older releases will probably need to hack a .desktop file).
• Links to mp3 contents should open Media player (again because we're passing along the mime type?)
• Links to WVX (and presumably anything else) with query parameters should be properly sent to Media player (Editor's note: Media player support for WVX was added in IT OS 2008)
• Loading an mms:// url should work (Editor's note: There's no bug reference in the changelog, I can't determine what this means)
• Add support for application/vnd.rn-realsystem-rmj; treat it video/x-real, and audio/x-real as streamable urls (instead of saving to disk before launching Media player) (Editor's note: Media player team claimed to fix something but didn't explain what, and I don't feel like diff'ing their source tree to figure it out.)
• Browser default plug-in "Description" field is now very short, useless and incorrect. (Editor's note: it seems that some reporter and engineer decided that it would be better not to show lots of semicolons, so instead we now make my job a lot harder when it comes to video/audio evangelism. That will be the subject of a least one blog article.)

Networking

• It should be possible to load a web page saved with images but which requires some other network resources without going back online. It will almost certainly require you to select cancel once for each resource which is not stored locally.

Packaging and Building

• tablet-browser-controls now lists a dependency to microb-eal-dev
• microb-eal-dev now lists a dependency to depend on microb-eal microb-eal-dev should depend on microb-eal
• microb-refui now lists a dependency to depend on libgtkmozembed microb-refui should depend on libgtkmozembed
• Should build in gregale
• OS 2006 uses a different plug-in directory (Editor's note: yeah, but what is it?)
• Browser UI is prelinked with microb engine
• Browser is now compiled with -fPIC (thanks to the toolchain sucking less and to no using maemo-launcher, although in theory they fixed maemo-launcher).
• At some point in time it built on HILDON2006 (If it doesn't, we'll try to fix it shortly....)
• MicroB uses system cairo (for canvas only!)
• We now include/package/use libsqlite and nssdbm libraries
• mozilla-config symlink is included in system directory
• mozstorage is enabled and built- but probably not very useful (no places)
• microb-refui now lists dependencies
• xulrunner package is available
• Added option to build microb-engine with an SVG backport (Editor's note: SVG is still disabled in this release)
• Gecko engine is probably approximately equivalent to a pull from 2007-09-29, this is done via the debian style of adding lots of patches on top of a base instead of actually updating the base.
• added libnspr package which adds some part of gecko to the ld.so.conf library search path (Editor's note: this will cause you great pain if you try to run your own mozilla on the platform.)

User interface

• Settings dialog title text is now properly distinct from the menu item that opens it. See footnotes.
• Plug-ins has been renamed to Components to reflect the fact that it includes both Plug-ins and Extensions. (Editor's note: Name and Description fields in the Component details dialog are misleading. For plug-ins, the description is actually a concatenated list of supported mime types and their descriptions - the Name is really its description. For exensions, I don't really understand what the Name field is, but it isn't simply the name.)
• Removed unused code (note to self: try to figure out what this means)
• New windows will now appear last in the window list (before they would return to their previous position if there was one, otherwise they were added to the top)
• Toolbar "Connecting" indicator will no longer accelerate with each successive load attempt
• Tapping link should always update toolbar address (note to self: figure out if this was a regression)
• Rapidly clicking the address bar quickly immediately after opening the first web browser window will result in the default url showing when it loads, instead of leaving a blank field. (editor's note: it's unclear that this change makes sense or is an improvement. the internal bug gives a slightly different actual result which is indeed slightly strange, however the required shipping result does appear to be a regression from beta. If someone feels that the new behavior is bad, please file a bug .)
• Windows menu should not be misplaced after loading a page with a very long title
• The toolbar buttons are no longer focusable (it used to be possible to move focus into them after interacting with the completion widget, this was surprising. As it isn't seen to be a useful behavior, it was removed).
• Trying to paste with an empty clipboard in Browser and Bookmarks should now use the standard system global "Nothing to paste" message instead of "Unable to paste".
• The Windows submenu should be properly positioned when web pages have long titles.
• The RSS button is now to the left of the urlbar.
• Restoring a backup from MicroB in OS2007 into an OS2008 device will result in a browser that crashes instead of just looping infinitely (please don't ask why this is considered a feature).
• !! Fixed restore plug-ins state if the browser crashes at low memory. !! (Editor's note: There's no bug reference in the changelog, I can't determine what this means)
• You can now save the contents of links using the Context Menu.
• about: now has localized text for the about:config link. make description for about:config localizable
• Set Preference in about:config now works with boolean types
• Deleting an unnamed download should no longer crash
• One of an infinite number of potential crashes in the download manager should no longer trigger a crash (Editor's note: There's no bug reference in the changelog, I can't easily determine what this means)
• Resuming downloads should not crash (Editor's note: There's no bug reference in the changelog, I can't easily determine what this means)
• Deleting an item from history should leave focus at the next item instead of lost in the void.
• Pressing hardware right should not scroll the components list of the components dialog.
• Focus for popup windows is properly tracked so trying to load a url in the window will not go to the window that had triggered the popup.
• Some possible plug-in crash should be fixed (Editor's note: There's no bug reference in the changelog, I can't determine what this means)
• Interrupting a load from Bluetooth will now generate a very annoying and poorly worded error dialog instead of a standard gecko error page (Editor's note: I clearly don't approve of this improvement)
• Save target as (using Browser) is now available to all libmime consumers (well, at least Chat)
• UI should be more responsive while the browser engine loads (Editor's note: There's no bug reference in the changelog, and the English is wrong...)
• Requests from an external application (Bookmarks) to "Open" an item in the "current" window after having closed a recently opened new window. (Editor's note: the "feature" of opening an item into a random existing window from an external application is probably a bug and needs to be reconsidered, usually the result is dataloss)
• Automatic is no longer included as an encoding in the Details dialog. In Gecko, we will always let Gecko detect an encoding, and the encoding shown in the dialog should be the encoding Gecko has detected, the user can choose any alternate encoding but it doesn't make sense to select automatic since that's always used first.
• Trying to save a page after asking the browser to quit with lots of windows open shouldn't crash. (Editor's note: why not? the user wants the browser to quit.... Don't ask me if the file should get saved or if you can actually try to save anymore.)
• History list should no longer truncate Cyrillic entries (no one explained if this would affect other non Latin encodings, the bug reports losing 1 character at the end of titles)
• The password saving dialog was re-implemented.
• Application Switcher now shows favicons with size 64x54 from gtk_window_set_icon. How this affects the browser on older platforms is uncertain as it seems we barely got testing for IT OS 2008. I also have no idea what happens when the only favicon for a site is 64x64, presumably the icon won't look great.... People are encouraged to file a bug complaining about this behavior (only file one bug, everyone else should just vote for it).
• Toggling Fit Width to View (and starting the Browser?) will now show an Updating banner (Editor's note: I have no idea why this is considered a feature, I know a number of people who have asked me if I'm familiar with this bug - namely the "Updating" banner when the browser launches)
• Task navigator list for bookmarks should have reasonable widths and if items are too long they should be truncated with ellipsis. (This is fallout from some API work core did)
• It's possible to re-enable plug-ins after they are disabled due to low memory conditions.
• Delete confirmation dialog should now appear in front of the downloads window. (Editor's note: the window manager seems to be really flaky. I've seen similar problems in a number of parts of the browser, and I walked an even worse variation of this visible in the Map application to the responsible engineer. Maybe they'll fix this for IT OS 2010.)
• Find toolbar will remember search string during the session even if you close and reopen it.
• Opening the find drop down will now highlight the most recently searched for item (i.e., the one closest to the find bar. hildon-find-toolbar-example.c
• Saved pages (with long filenames/url parameters?) should include an html file extension so that File manager will know to use Browser to open the file.
• OK in settings dialog should really save the settings....
• Control-B will open the bookmarks menu ... at the same location as if you had tapped the toolbar button. (Editor's note: I did not approve of this keybinding as it results in conflicts with Google and other Web Applications....)
• Pressing <escape> will dismiss the bookmarks toolbar menu.
• Switching to full-screen mode while a page is loading will stick, instead of restoring normal view.
• Enabled support for XBM image format
• Browser is no longer built against maemo launcher, this seems to result in the best launch times.
• Launching the browser with a url should load it directly without first loading about:blank.
• Save as with images (for html pages) is now part of the normal File save as dialog (available as a type field, and only visible for html documents).
• Mime types were added to the default plug-in to try to fix wave file support. (Editor's note: However this was all removed later. I believe the only interesting changes were telling our testers to fix their testcases.)
• Focus should move to the web page when loading a page from the location bar.
• Selecting text in an <input> should have a better chance of working instead of being treated as a thumb-panning action.
• It should still be possible to trigger the vkb and fkb from <input>s. (Editor's note: If you don't think the preceding couple of bullets are juggling conditions, I have a dozen more egg-citing conditions you can try juggling, no points for dropping or breaking any eggs.)
• Restored support for PAC (nsProxyAutoConfig.js was not packaged)
• Restored global-region properties (Editor's note: letting people who don't understand Gecko remove files from the distributed set is not recommended.)
• Rephrased error messages for:
  1. malformedURI
  2. fileNotFound
  3. dnsNotFound
  4. connectionFailure
  5. netTimeOut
  6. proxyResolveFailure
  7. proxyConnectFailure
  8. redirectLoop
  9. deniedPortAccess
  (Editor's note: upon review of the results, we don't like them, see footnotes.)

• vkb should be able to open on places like www.hotmail.com because we now process the mouse up instead of the click event (which sites can choose to swallow).
• tapping an input field that would appear below the vkb might properly scroll the field into view after showing the vkb (or it might not, an extra fix got posted around the time of this announcement and it looks like it wasn't accepted for the release).
• Enter key in fkb should not be detected by web sites, e.g. www.hotmail.com
• Completing a download should be handled better (Editor's note: the changelog for this item just says it's cleaning something.)
• Frame details page size should show the size of page in the frame, and not the frameset containing it.
• Page load should succeed even if interrupted to save a new connection if you picked one in response to a select connection dialog.
• Fit width to view is disabled by default (Editor's note: it's not a very good feature anyway.)
• Fit width to view should work slightly better (Editor's note: the comment gives no indication about how/why/under what circumstances.)
• Fit width to view will try harder to avoid a horizontal scrollbar (Editor's note: at least for praca.monsterpolska.pl)
• Opening a new window shouldn't affect the ability to activate/deactivate Fit width to view in the original window.
• RSS content should be indicated when pages finish loading (Editor's note: this doesn't mean it works in all cases, and given the lack of a bug report or change set, there's no guarantee it means anything at all.)
• Loading an unrecognized protocol should result in some "friendly" error. (Editor's note: the error message is not friendly, and the Connecting bar doesn't stop until you click OK.)
• Plug-ins should not be deleted (!?) if they're disabled and the browser quits unexpectedly (crash/kill/battery removed) (Editor's note: the bug doesn't explain the fix or what actually happened at the file system level, I only speculated based on the description.)
• EAL should launch without system DBUS
• Save as should work from the frame CSM submenu.
• Clicking mailto: links will no longer leave the toolbar stuck in the connecting state.
• Unrequested pop-up windows should now trigger an information banner when Enable pop-up windows: is set to Only requested.
• Found and fixed some instances of using freed memory relating to opening and closing browser windows.
• Loading an image directly will result in a scaled down version if it's bigger than the window. browser.enable_automatic_image_resizing
• Browser shouldn't crash when quit if there are no plug-ins....
• Start page should be shown with a url of Home.html (Editor's note: yes, this isn't a url, and yes your home page might be something else. Yes, I'd rather call it Start.html, yes, I lost.)
• Hardware keys will trigger mouse move events, and those coordinates will probably relate to the center of the selected element. (Editor's note: why? answer: because we're specified to do so)
• Tabbing will now focus links because using accessibility.tabfocus = 7 meant that hardware navigation would not work on pages without textareas.
• Disabled indirect threading in spidermonkey because it seems to cause frequent random crashes at various sites. (Editor's note: We suspect gcc3.3/arm toolchain is buggy. Given that JS_THREADED_INTERP is only supposed to be a performance improvement, it's a good thing to drop.)
• Focus shouldn't leave a <select> element prematurely while navigating using the hardware navigation keys.
• Each page in back/forward history should remember its zoom level
• Pages with HasUnloadListeners will now have their zoom state preserved if the page is scrolled. (Editor's note: Otherwise it isn't. These are edge cases, if you care, you're welcome to learn Gecko or write your own layout engine.)
• Native theming for <select> widgets is mostly implemented.
• Native theming for <input type=checkbox> and <input type=radio>
• Height of <input type=file> should be reasonable
• Imported fix for Hang with display: table-caption, large padding and left float inside it
• Uninitialized value used in nsTypedSelection::AddRange()
• Holding hardware arrows to trigger scrolling should result in fairly continuous scrolling (no link navigation, and focus should be cleared)
• Pressing a hardware arrow key when there is no focus on the screen should result in focus being inserted according to cardinal locations (up = top of screen, etc.) (Editor's note: The entire hardware arrow key handling is a waste of effort and resources. I'd appreciate it if people contacted me indicating how often they try to use it, and why.)
• RSS channel items should not be duplicated (Editor's note: this change is odd, it definitely fixes the testcase, but what does it break?)
• Entering multiple words into the location bar will now trigger Google's "I'm feeling lucky" search.
• Pages that serve RSS content with XSLT (i.e., BBC) should trigger the RSS toolbar button.
• Trying to get a context menu on an automatically resized image should not result in continuous swaps between resized and normal image states. Similarly, it should be possible to pan non resized images, instead of just having them toggle between states. (Editor's note: ah, the wonders of our flaky XServer/touch-screen. This code is 100% pure hackery. It also indicates a design flaw. We should just remove the feature and offer the Microsoft floating toolbar style instead.)
• One potential crash involving an incremental download test over https should not happen
• Save as web page, complete should now include a proper charset (Editor's note: subject to bugs documented in Incorrect meta tag is used by Save As "Web, page complete" (character encoding specified incorrectly) )
• Documents in designMode will suppress the ability to open the fkb, you will need to configure the select button to activate the thumb keyboard.
• You can disable spatial navigation by setting snav.enabled to false
• Note that you shouldn't use more than 4 browser windows (Editor recommends 3), unfortunately a related preference browser.sessionhistory.max_entries was tuned from 50 (desktop value) to 31 (random value). People are advised to tune it to 8.
• Removed code to add extra scrollbars (this code doesn't exist in CVS)
• Network error pages will not show horizontal scrollbars (inner content will probably have such scrollbars, but that's different)
• Added support for WMODE plug-ins (thanks to karlt for the work) Windowless plug-in support for X (WMODE) (Editor's note: at this time there are no NPAPI plug-ins for Maemo support this feature. I hope to find someone to package a WMODE enabled DiamondX plug-in so people can see how pretty it is.)
• We should no longer be violating NPAPI to talk to Flash. (Editor's note: well, the changelog didn't say that, but the engineer said that this changed and I'm assuming that entry is what he meant)
• When you visit an image directly in the web browser, if it's bigger than the available window size, you can tap it to shrink it to fit. If you had zoomed it before tapping, when you tap again, the zoom level will be restored. This zoom out will try to ensure the area you clicked on is visible close to where you clicked. (Editor's notes: 1. If the image at 100% would fit in the window, and you zoom it to e.g., 240% so that it no longer fits in the window, you can't click to zoom out -- This seems reasonable. 2. In testing it seems that if your window is zoomed and you then load an image without a webpage and you want to use tap to zoom, you will first have to change your zoom. 3. On the N810 with the toolbar visible and shrink to fit active, opening the keyboard tray will result in the image shrinking again. The keyboard indicator is awful and needs to be redesigned, this is one of many ways that it breaks the web browser.)
• Network errors should be properly skinned (including an exclamation mark)
• Back/Forward should remember vertical position even when Fit width to view is enabled
• CSM shouldn't be triggered when you simply click on an element in a page that uses mouse event handlers
• Pressing hardware select while the focussed element is offscreen will blur the object instead of triggering it (Editor's note: web pages can do interesting things in response to Blur, but our UI spec demands that conceptually it not be possible for focus to be on an offscreen element)
• Using spatial navigation on yahoo.com might not crash (Editor's note: the patch alters a "fix" for navigating google.com, but invalidates the comment)
• Undid a change to improve the contrast for text in disabled <textareas>s (Editor's note: the reporter complained that the texarea was unreadable, but worry not, while the beta included a "fix", it was reverted because of a specification, so you too can see the unreadable textarea - of course the engineer shouldn't have touched the bug, but we work by "fixing" bug reports - so file bug reports!)
• You might be able to use the hardware navigation keys in docs.google.com

Known Issues

• Opening the vkb for a <textarea> will probably ignore autocapitalization mode and just use lowercase. (Editor's note: this seems to be rocket science, and the APIs involved don't seem to be particularly useful/workable.)
• Due to X or the touch driver or something being oversensitive, it is basically impossible to tap on a single pixel and expect an application not to hear mouse move events. (Editor's note: I'm sorry, but there's really nothing anyone can do. If you think this problem is hard, imagine having at least five dimensions (That's the problem here), anyway, here's what the one dimensional problem looks like:

• CSM animation doesn't always go away (Editor's note: the bug report sucks, it talks about a "dialog", but it probably means a web application emulated dialog. The problem probably relates to imperfect accounting of click targets.)

Footnotes

For people wondering about User Interface style, the general rule is:

• A menu item to perform a given task should have ellipsis (...) only if there is a need to ask the user for additional information in order to complete the task.
• The Nokia style unfortunately differs and basically says all menus that trigger dialogs should have ellipsis (...). (See also Apple's rules)

• Never use the same identifier for terms that appear in different contexts.
• If you're going to give localizers text to translate, make certain that the text is not grammatically incorrect in the original language. It should also use the clearest and most common/popular words to describe terms and concepts, unless you have explicitly defined terms for your localizers.