E61 browser hints?

I have picked up a few other snags with the browser - registering on AAS for instance was impossible as it kept redirecting me after entering my age. Maybe thought i was too old for this 😉 another thing I miss is the ability to disable picture loading and then load pics selectively as I need to see them. The bandwidth cost is going to kill me so im using trusty Opera Mini for the moment.

Pieterjh wrote:Is there any info avaiable on advanced usage of the (very impressive) browser on the E61? I have upgraded from a 9300i and miss a few features:

To be honest, I've tried to use the new browser for a while and while it's an amazing application, probably the most impressive S60 v3 application realeased so far, if you want to do any serious web browsing, it's unfortunaltely completely useless. They've tried to make a desktop PC web browser fit in a smartphone but have forgotten that smartphones have a tiny screens and no mouse (i'm pretty sure that the guy in charge of this project had never tried to browse the web on a S60 device).

It isn't possible to open more than one window at once even though it can technically do it since it can open pop-up windows. The soft pointer, while looking cool at first sight, gets quickly very annoying when it comes to select a particular link, text field or button. The zoom levels are few and most of them useless (either too small or too large). There is no fit-to-width mode so you have to constantly scroll left and right, which quickly becomes a real pain. All that is not helped by the very poor joystick and the lack of shortcuts for Page Up/Down/Left/Right.

If you're after a usable web browser, i'd avise you to try Opera Mobile (the real Opera, not Opera Mini). It's vastly superior than the Nokia Web browser. Even though it doesn't have the cool visual history or mini map, it does have a really nice looking interface, does render pages as good or almost as good as the Nokia browser, has a proper zoom bar, has configurable shortcuts for just about everything uncluding Page Up/Down, has a proper fit-to-width mode and this associated with the Page Up/Down shortcuts and its nice smooth-scrolling makes browsing long web pages a breeze. And yes, It can open more than one window at a time (although i haven't yet found a way to open a ling in a new window). I don't know about your file download problems but best is to try.

elp wrote: The zoom levels are few and most of them useless (either too small or too large).

I disagree, if you set the zoom out level to maximum and the font size to minimum, you end up with a browser that can display 80 to 100% of the width of most sites, so there's little or no need to scroll sideways most of the time.

The Nokia browser does have stuff that needs improvement (my own personal request would be home and end buttons to get to the bottom and top of pages instead of scrolling), but it's still vastly better than the terrible Services browser that came before it.

In defence of the pointer thing, it's not quite the same as a normal pointer and it does jump to links that are nearby. The effect is quite subtle and you might not consciously notice it, but you can flick between links that are next to each other.

Opera is great but it costs �20, although there's a third option called Netfront which only costs �10 and is pretty good too.

Thanks for the comments. I have downloaded Opera and have been using it for about 10 days. Unfortunately I am no closer to deciding whether to fork out for Opera. It IS a more polished product, but as to whether its worth that much, i dunno. Here are some points:
a)Opera has fewer bugs
b)I can download files without having the auto execute. BIG ISSUE!!
c)Small screen reflow works great.
d)On the other hand, you need it, because the large screen rendering is not as good as with S60browser.
e)Going BACK to previous pages is instant.
f)Im not convinced its worth the money.

I perfer the opera browser because of a very significant bug in the Nokia browser. Namely that if you are typing in text boxes, it is impossible to scroll down, so after a few lines it is impossible for you to see what you are typing!

😡

The sis file thing is due to the mime type being incorrectly set on the host server. Unfortunately it has changed between 8 and 9.