Quote:
Originally Posted by ixtab
Sorry, but this is something that I don't get.
You're about to return an E-book reader because a feature that is completely out of the original scope of the device, and is clearly labeled as experimental, does not allow you to do "advanced" things?
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First, it's not outside the original scope of the device. They advertise it has having a web browser. This isn't some easter egg that you have to type a URL into a search bar to find. This is an actual, advertised feature, and the Kindle Touch came with that feature from day one, AFAIK. Therefore, it is within the original scope of the Kindle Touch.
Second, touch event and click event support is not advanced. Touch support for a touch-based browser is considered very basic functionality these days. Having some form of either touch support or mousedown/mouseup support is the absolute minimum requirement for writing any usable interactive JavaScript code. This device lacks working versions of both of those. Every other touch-based mobile browser on the planet has supported touch events for at least two or three years, and iOS has supported them for almost four. Mousedown and mouseup events have been supported by nearly every browser written since Netscape 2.0 (1996). Features that have been in common use for more than 15 years simply don't qualify as "advanced" in any sane universe.
I'd expect an experimental browser to have bugs that cause crashes. I'd expect it to lack what are currently considered advanced features—scalable vector graphics support, WebGL, and so on. I would tolerate a limited set of fonts or a limited range of UTF-8 glyphs. I would even accept some rendering quirks that would require slightly different CSS or HTML to accommodate it. To me, experimental means that it is basically working, but that it still has some quirks.
By contrast, this browser is not "basically working". I've never seen a browser that takes nearly two full seconds just to
start handling a click—not even when I was using NCSA Mosaic 0.9 betas on 68k Macs in the mid 1990s. That's just not acceptable performance even if my only need for the browser were occasionally looking something up in WikiPedia. This browser made my circa-1999 Palm III look like a speed demon by comparison. I can't imagine how anyone could consider that to be acceptable performance, even for an experimental browser.
Further, the fact that web browsers took twenty years to reach the performance they have today is irrelevant. Amazon started with WebKit, a fully functioning browser core that got them about 98% of the way for free. Instead of spending a few months integrating it correctly with their OS's touch support, they left the thing in a borderline unusable state. Since I have no way of knowing if they will ever fix that, I'd have to be crazy to keep the device.
I bought the Kindle Touch because I needed an E-Ink device with a built-in browser. It was one of only two E-Ink tablets that has a browser without having to root the device. Amazon advertised that it came with a browser, but provided no details about what was and was not supported. The only way to find out was to buy it and try it. I concluded that it lacked critical basic functionality, so I returned it. Simple as that. If Amazon wants to avoid such returns in the future, they can feel free to publish a document outlining what is and is not supported in their experimental browser. Otherwise, they can safely expect that people who actually hope to use the browser will be seriously disappointed.
I'm now happily running a rooted Nook Simple Touch with Opera Mobile. It supports my needs almost flawlessly. For such a trivial web app, anything less than almost flawless is a shock, because what I'm doing really is that basic.... And even the basic Android WebKit browser worked much better than what Kindle provided—you know, the built-in Nook browser that's so unofficial that they don't even advertise it as a feature. For something advertised as a feature—even an experimental feature—I expected far better than what I got.