Talk:Browse

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Revision as of 21:42, 19 January 2008 by Rharrison (talk | contribs) (Usability notes)
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Feature Requests

Is there a way to view what a link is before clicking on it? Is there a way to click on a link and have it open as another session? Is there a way to get a right click? 75.174.12.49 10:39, 21 December 2007 (EST)

As best I can tell, none of the link-navigation techniques work on my G1G1 unit. Up and down work, as do north/south, but no panning, no focus, no jump. chris

It looks like the navigation keys are not implemented yet, so the game keys and direction pad perform the same functions they do in all other activities: The game direction pad maps to the up/down/left/right keys on a regular computer's keypad, while the north/south keys map to page up/page down on a keypad and the east/west keys map to home and end. If you want to navigate the page without the mouse, you pretty much have to use Tab to jump between links and Enter to follow them. —Joe 23:46, 21 December 2007 (EST)

Is there a way to search for text within a page (like Ctrl-F does in Firefox)?

  • I think it'd really help to have shortcut keys for the Back (i.e. go back one page) and Forward navigation buttons. The standard Mozilla Firefox keys are Alt+Left Arrow for Back, and Alt+Right Arrow for Forward. BlankVerse 23:05, 22 December 2007 (EST)
From the Browse page, supposedly the WEST gamepad key will be Back, when implemented. I agree regular keyboard shortcuts would be nice. -- Skierpage 02:37, 26 December 2007 (EST)

Would be nice if HTTP Authentication worked (like, perhaps displaying the user/pass dialog when a site returns 401). Yes, some sites still use it. KenWatford 21:49, 27 December 2007 (EST)

Implementation Discussion

Anyone know what the browser identification for OLPC shows up in web logs as?

Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; chrome://navigator/locale/navigator.properties; rv:1.9a6) Gecko/20070917
Above, is not good. For sites which base on browser capabilities... php 'getbrowse' returns 'none/unknown'. Would be better to return proper formatted browser identification (even if completely new, ? "Sugar/1.0.3 Browse/650 etc".. for display of your current browser string.) See example box on http://garetjax.info/projects/browscap/ --Iain 03:05, 30 December 2007 (EST)

This is better now, eg from sugar-jhbuild just now:

 65.7.x.x - - [03/Jan/2008:02:16:56 -0800] "GET / HTTP/1.1" 200 2802 "-" "Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686;
 en-US; rv:1.9b2pre) Gecko OLPC/Update.1 (XO)"
 65.7.x.x - - [03/Jan/2008:02:16:56 -0800] "GET /img/icon.png HTTP/1.1" 200 15515 "http://adric.net/"
 "Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.9b2pre) Gecko OLPC/Update.1 (XO)"

--Adricnet 05:21, 3 January 2008 (EST)

Codec detection for Real Streams?

Using Browse I'm unable to open many BBC links - the mediaselector in this link: [[1]]

...greys out the Real player option, and only offers WMV for some reason, when viewed using the B4.

Screenshot showing mediaselector error in Browse

I'm not sure whether these are issues with Browse or Watch&Listen not recognising MIME types for .ram files?

I have submitted a ticket [here]. --Tomhannen 05:47, 10 December 2007 (EST)

Wikifier

see Charityware#Wikifier

Usability notes

Some usability suggestions, now that I've played with Browse a bit.

  • Full screen mode: no obvious way to get out if it if you got there from the toolbar. Alt-Enter is not obvious; the "Bulletin board" key was my first guess, since it looks like the standard toolbar icon for switching between multiple/single screens. The "Escape" and "Frame" keys were my next guesses. There at least ought to be an icon on the Frame to get out of full screen mode.
  • E-book mode: different rocker key mappings would be better for browsing, similar to the Lynx browser:
    • Rocker down: next link on page
    • Rocker up: previous link on page
    • Rocker right: go to link
    • Rocker left: back in history
  • Find in page: I didn't see any way to search for text within a long page.

--IanOsgood 12:16, 22 December 2007 (EST)

E-book mode suggestion 2

I'd like to see the game pad keys control the UI in the same way that the user controls it in laptop mode. By having the dpad control the "mouse" cursor and using the buttons control clicking and page up / page down or zoom in / out usage would be much more intuitive. |DPad Left|Move cursor left| |DPad Up|Move cursor up| |DPad Right|Move cursor right| |DPad Down|Move cursor down| |Square button|left mouse click| |Check button|right mouse click| |Circle button|page up or zoom out| |X button|page down or zoom in|

Side to side scrolling of the page could be done by left clicking on a part of the page that doesn't link, and moving the DPad.

Hobbled Browser Feels Wrong

The default browser feels severely hobbled. Several important browser features seem to be inexplicably missing: bookmarking, tabbed browsing, right-click popup menu. Since the Web is the world's information source, and the browser is so central to its exploration, it feels wrong to hobble the browser this way. I read elsewhere that bookmark-like capability is available via the journal, but that isn't a substitute for browser-based bookmarking. And if memory usage with tabbed browsing is a concern, well, it's the user's choice to open more tabs and consume more memory: the child will quickly learn what the limitations are and make decisions accordingly. There are several other apps pre-loaded with the laptop, such as the music sequencer, that (though great to include) are far less central to learning than the browser. In short, there IS no app more central to learning than the browser. (Even writing can be done in a browser.) How about making the browser more fully functional? -- DBooth 22:41, 13 January 2008 (EST) on a G1G1