Day in, day out…

I’ve been using the next generation of Opera Mini browser – Opera Mini 5 beta – on my BlackBerry Pearl.

In a nutshell – in comparison with Opera Mini 4 – it looks slick, but usability sucks!

It is almost sacrilegious to comment on the quality of a Beta product, but I couldn’t find a way to pass on my feedback to Opera directly (comment, if you know how). May be folks at Opera haven’t tested this version with BlackBerry Pearl. May be the Pearl is just too old. But here is what’s been bothering me last few days:

Keyboard Shortcuts

I don’t know about others, but I use keyboard shortcuts extensively with Opera Mini. To access speed dial entries, to refresh, to go to bookmarks, etc.

In Mini 4, it was as easy as hitting * n to access speed dial entry n (e.g., * 1 for speed dial 1, * 2 for speed dial 2, etc.).

In Mini 5 beta, the ALT key must be used to use a symbol or number. So the keyboard not-so-shortcut to access speed dial entry n becomes ALT * ALT n (e.g., ALT * ALT 1 for speed dial 1, ALT * ALT 2 for speed dial 2, etc.). A little annoying!

Typing

The Inline Editing feature in Mini 5 beta allows you to use the multi-tap input method to edit text-box entries on web pages. I prefer using the SureType input method. So I turned off the Inline Editing feature.

Even without Inline Editing, the text box entries are edited right on the web page. Mini 4 would open a text entry dialog of a sort to edit text. This is cool!

Scrolling

Now this could be just that my Pearl is too old for the new generation of software, it doesn’t have enough resources to handle them. But scrolling performance is really poor. Every scrolling movement results in the hourglass (processor busy). I have a feeling that it still accepts trackball inputs while it is busy, though. Because when the hourglass is gone, its scrolls way too much. I must scroll back to get where I want to – which of course means another few seconds of hourglass.

This is not an issue in Mini 4.

Mobile view

Staying on the scrolling topic, what happened to the fast scrolling in mobile view by moving the trackball horizontally? That was so handy! In Mini 5, the mouse pointer is always visible. So moving the trackball horizontally only moves the pointer.

I loved how Mini 4 would go to next link or page down/up by moving the trackball vertically and scroll fast by moving it horizontally.

For now, I am just trying to get used to keyboard navigation. It results in a slightly better performance.

Fonts

Mini 4 fonts were almost perfect sized for me. Mini 5 beta fonts are either too big, or too small. In my settings, I’ve set the font size to medium. Which makes fonts a little bigger than what Mini 4 had. I guess I’ll get used to them.

However, the fonts on Mini 5 beta’s menu and other interface are a little too small. Wonder how to change them, I am sure there is a way.

All in all, I think Mini 5 beta is a neat looking browser for the phone, but seems a little resource hungry, which in case of an older phone like the Pearl is a problem. Most of the new features are targeted towards touchscreen devices and don’t apply to Pearl.

What’s been your experience?

Since its Alphas, I’ve been comparing font rendering in official Firefox 3.0 Linux builds and the ones I used to compile myself. Fonts in the official builds were, and still are, very crudely rendered. Upon reading a little, I learned that this difference is due to the use of different version of Cairo, a graphics library that Firefox uses under the hood.

Using --enable-system-cairo option when building Firefox greatly improves the look of fonts. I used to compile my own nightly builds using this option, hoping that the official builds will move to using that option too, before the final 3.0 release.

I just tried the final release and found that it still does not use --enable-system-cairo option, and the fonts are still not neat.

Thankfully, I also noticed that Ubuntu’s Firefox 3.0 – that got updated today as well, does use --enable-system-cairo option. Now I don’t have to compile my own builds. I wish I had noticed this the first time I installed Hardy – the Firefox 3.0 beta that came with it probably used system Cairo too. But I am glad I noticed this, better late than never.

Here are a couple of screenshots that illustrate the difference:

Click on the image to view full size – The one on top is the Ubuntu build, using --enable-system-cairo option. The one a the bottom is the official Firefox build, not using that option. Notice how the fonts in the Ubuntu build are so much better than the fonts in the official Firefox build

Now, go download Firefox 3.0 while it’s hot. You don’t get to set a world record everyday!

Support for Indic script in Mozilla Browsers on the Mac has so far been missing. But I got a pleasant surprise with the latest trunk builds of both Firefox and Camino. They both handle Indic Scripts pretty well. I am sure this is thanks to Gecko 1.9.

Here’s what I am talking about. The snapshot below shows rendering of Hindi version of Google News on Camino 1.5. It is mostly… well, question marks!

Following is the same page viewed with the trunk version of Camino. That’s more like it!

Like I mentioned, I saw this with trunk versions of both Firefox and Camino – with many websites using Indic script.

शुभ वाचन !! (Happy Reading… if there’s such a greeting )

I like Camino, but it is not my default browser on the Mac – Firefox is.

So far, I was under the impression that Firefox like Live Bookmarks – or more so the lack of them in Camino – was the show stopper for me. But recently, I have stopped, although not completely, using Live Bookmarks in Firefox.

I was wondering, what changed? Turns out, I was mostly using Live Bookmarks like a feed reader. Once I started using Google Reader, I no longer felt the need to use Live Bookmarks the way I was using them.

Secondly, I had feed that contained all the websites I visit frequently. I Live Bookmark’d that feed to get access to that list from multiple machines. I’ve started using Google Bookmarks – via the Google Toolbar – to maintain a globally accessible repository of my bookmarks.

So it was not exactly Live Bookmarks that I was missing in Camino. What I was missing was the ability to gain access to my bookmarks that I might have updated at work, or on a different machine etc. Now I am going to find out if there is a way to use Google Bookmarks in Camino – other than over the web of course.