My Treo’s touchscreen was freaking out on me for a little while, but it seems ok for now. I’m thinking I’ll need to give Handspring a call and see what’s up. In any case, I think I’ll do a little blogroll list a-la what I did for the hiptop (to this day btw, most of the list remains accurate; Danger never fixed anything).
The Blazer 3.0 browser has fairly complete CSS + JS support; and for the most part renders stuff well. It does take a while to render stuff (it’s not efficient about letting you navigate partial pages – still not bad, avg time to navigation is about 20s from hitting the request button, full page typically loads in about a minute), and doesn’t seem to be very smart about its caching (it’ll try to reconnect the last page when you don’t have a signal but won’t load up the cache). I’ve included the page sizes that it gets (spoiled by broadband). These are of optimized views (wide layouts seem to be even better; congrats Blazer team):
+ randomfoo.net - no header in optimized mode; 270.5K + a.wholelottanothing.org - header compressed, otherwise good; 221.1K + lyd - looks real good, miniblog shows up first; 47.4K + waxy.org - looks real good; 55.2K + torrez.org looks real good; 10.3K + sixfoot6 - looks real good; 192.2K + onfocus - loads, eventually; 334.7K + megnut - looks real good; 48.8K ! kottke - causes a soft reset! no joke; tried multiple times + anil - legible, has two columns (?) ~ Simon Willison - wraps just a little wide; 37.3K - 0xDECAFBAD - content space is a thin sliver, funky even in wide mode; 216.5K + Zeldman - nav first, otherwise good; 103.7K + Mezzoblue - long nav at top, works; 108.7K + whatdoiknow - scaled headers, otherwise good; 74.4K ~ Clagnut - text column half-width; otherwise ok; 139.4K + meyerweb - some design overlap, but quite legible; 77.6K + eatonweb - all nav on top, otherwise good; 45.0K + unoriginal creativity - nav appears first, otherwise good; 53.8K + disastro - no header, nav text/bg color rendered the same, otherwise good; 14.9K + boingboing - looks real good; 298.6K ~ mefi - slightly thin text columns; 63.6K + /. - looks really good; 82.9K Friendster, Tribe, and Upcoming.org load up fine. Friendster sometimes renders weird (ads or frames space weirdness?), but I was able to use it well enough over the weekend to look up an event location from a bulletin board posting.
Browser improvements I’d like:
- Threaded browsing, heck being able to access the menu while it redraws would be nice
- gzip support
- Bookmarks that remember wide/optimized pref
- easier switching from wide/optimized mode
- image zooming
- easier to switch images on/off, CSS and JS while we’re at it
- Typing goes directly into URL bar, a la hiptop
- drop-down type auto-complete
- Better Cache Control
- can’t be fixed really, but the 11-bit screen is *really* annoying
To look into: more into browser info, does it support handheld stylesheets?