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Maemo Browsers Comparison: MicroB, Fennec, Midori, Tear

2009-06-13 11:33 - Tech

I've been on vacation this week, visiting my Dad. Shortly before I left, I discovered the Nokia N810 Internet Tablet. I decided it would be a great way to read the eBooks I was thinking about bringing, and decided to get one. It runs Maemo, a customized (Debian-based) version of Linux designed to run on these tiny tablets. I've been enjoying the device quite a bit.

Being an "internet tablet", one of the things it should do well is web browsing. It comes with a very functional browser, but as I was discovering all the programs that I can install, I found others. In fact, I now have four different web browsers installed on my NIT. Which is best? Which should I use? I quickly found strengths and weaknesses of each browser, but no clear winner. What follows is the best of both my objective and subjective judgements on the topic. First a quick key:

	Feature not provided
	Feature partially provided
	Feature completely provided

Where "partial" means either not as completely as the other browsers, or somehow lacking (in my opinion). Completely provided means it satisfies me. First, I'll present the table of data. Following that will be a section for each browser, pointing out my observations, and details that don't fit into the table.

	MicroB	Fennec	Midori	Tear
Links	Home WP	Home WP	Home WP FAQ	Home (?)
Tested Version	1.0.1	1.0b1	0.1.4	0.3.1
Rendering Engine	Gecko	Gecko	WebKit	WebKit
Extensions
Bookmarklets
User Scripts	*		*
User Styles			*
In-page Anchors
Stylus-drag Scrolling
Hardware Cancel as Back
Hardware D-pad	Anchor selection	Anchor selection		Scrolling
Session Restore / Crash Handling	? *		*	*
Tabs
Cookie/Privacy Clear
.install file handling
Search In Page		*
Select Text
"Right Click" (long tap)				*
HTTP Authentication
SSL Self-signed Cert			*	*
Flash: YouTube
Flash: Game
Linked Media (w/ mplayer-plugin)
Embedded Media (w/ mplayer-plugin)
Speed: Launch	8.888 s	10.738 s	6.016 s	8.008 s
Speed: Load Google Maps	82.489 s	54.628 s	33.908 s	34.692 s
Speed: maemo.org	11.080 s	13.586 s	13.674 s	9.627 s
Speed: yahoo.com	13.598 s	18.232 s	9.848 s	10.072f s

Notes

• All speed timings were the average of at least three runs. There were no other running programs. Outliers were manually eliminated.

MicroB

• Bookmarklets run, but it then thinks that it's loading a page, which it is not. It will say "Connecting ..." in the progress bar forever.
• Can do user styles with ~/.mozilla/microb/chrome/userContent.css mostly a'la Firefox. Not quite documented, but mentioned at least at the Maemo wiki. The chrome directory doesn't exist though, so you have to know about this.
• Limited extensions/plugins, no integration: http://browser-extras.garage.maemo.org/downloads_os2008.html
• Gets full "user scripts" because Greasemonkey is one of the available extensions. (Although not the latest version.)
• Couldn't appropriately test what happens with a crash yet. I could kill -9 the others easily, but MicroB seems too tightly integrated with Maemo for this to work.
• Seems to be the only browser with detection for, and thus display of, the feed icon. Only launches the built-in RSS reader, though.
• YouTube pages load and the video starts in just over 15 seconds. The page is usually still loading at this point, so video playback is a bit jerky until it finishes, but then very good.

Fennec

• There's no registered icon; the task navigator shows the default four boxes. Annoying
• User styles work if you put a chrome/userContent.css file in your profile, a'la Firefox. The chrome directory doesn't exist though, so you have to know about this.
• The link you tapped is visible for a moment, as the next page loads. A nice, subtle way of providing feedback that makes it feel faster, though it certainly isn't, technically.
• No scroll bars to tap, you must drag-to-scroll.
• Clicking a .install will give you the open/save dialog, which makes it possible (but annoying) to use these files.
• Search in page is very buggy right now. Display isn't quite right, and if the found term isn't on the screen, it's not scrolled to make it on the screen.
• It's impossible to select any text, even that in a form input.
• YouTube pages load and the video starts in just over 30 seconds. I can't interact with the player, Fennec seems to get confused and treat the player like a text input (clicking it brings up the completion/shift bar), and none of my taps have any effect. The video plays very slowly, so much so that it can't keep up with the audio.
• Same problem with flash games, making them impossible to use.

Unique features:

• It combines the Firefox Awesomebar and Opera Speed Dial into a very usable feature. Tap the address bar, and you get "speed dial". Start typing and it searches like an awesomebar. It's a great feature which doesn't combine with the pop-up full-screen keyboard on the N180.
• Full screen keeps the UI, but scrolling down moves it off screen (as does normal view). It's nice to so easily get full screen view on a small screen, but still have easy access to the UI.
• Double-tap for a quick toggle between zoomed-in and normal view.

Midori

• Claims extensions written in C. I'm not sure if there are any available that work on Maemo.
• User scripts and styles are claimed as features, but I couldn't make them work.
• Tapping in the address bar does NOT select the text, so typing a new URL takes an extra step.
• Gives a "crash detected" box, with the option to change some settings, but no session recovery.
• The only progress indicator is that the reload button turns into the stop button (and sometimes the location bar fills as a progress bar, depending on what you're waiting for). I've wondered a bit too often "Did I miss tapping that link?"
• You can drag-to-select, but double and triple tap do nothing.
• Got a half for self-signed cert, because such a site just loads, with no dialog or confirmation. Not necessarily bad, but unusual.
• YouTube pages load and the video starts in two or three minutes. After that significant delay, it's watchable.

Unique features:

• Dragging the stylus selects text instead of scrolling, like the other three do.
• Search in page is by far the best: works as you intend, does search-as-you-type like Firefox (optionally) does, highlights all terms (current in a different color).

Tear

• The hardest to install, until you find the right Qole's repository.
• You can select one word or one paragraph (double/triple tap), but dragging after that scrolls the page, you can't select more.
• Long-tap for right click works, but it's easy to then accidentally drag-to-scroll which closes the context menu.
• Got a half for self-signed cert, because such a site just loads, but has no dialog or confirmation. Not necessarily bad, but unusual.
• YouTube pages load and the video starts in two or three minutes. After that significant delay, it's watchable.

Unique features:

• The only browser with "kinetic" drag scrolling; the reason it got full and the others got half. (I've yet to make the subjective judgement over whether I like this, though.)
• Its default home page is a "dashboard" very much like Opera Speed Dial. Quick access to history and bookmarks, plus Google Search. Unfortunately, this is mashed into about:blank, making it hard to really get a blank page if that's what you prefer.
• The only browser of these four to do session recovery after a crash.
• Like above; The Close menu has a "close and save all" feature, so you can come back where you were after quitting.

Conclusion

I'm having a very difficult time picking a winner. Every browser has at least one thing missing/slowest. Every browser has at one thing best/fastest. The two webkit based browsers seem to be faster overall. But they both crashed a bit in my maemo.org speed tests — and that's not a super complicated page. They're both significantly faster on the JS-heavy Google Maps page, but still barely within the realm of usability -- and Flash support is much worse (YouTube is nigh unusable).

Fennec has a lot of really nice things going on. The double-tap-zoom feature is very nice, the UI is featureful, and easily gets out of the way on the small screen. There's the promise of being able to write extensions for it just like I do for Firefox. But it's also clearly the slowest. I hold out hope that it will get better once out of beta, but I can't quite choose it yet.

For now, I think I'll use MicroB and/or Midori primarily. I know there's a newer version of Midori out there, but not yet ported to Maemo completely. It might be worth investigating. The Midori ChangeLog indicates a few very interesting new features, plus 0.1.7 is supposed to be the "stable" version.