Menneisyys
02-18-2006, 09:58 AM
Getting tired of Minimo reviews/reports? ;) So am I – I'd like to work on my Qmail review/tutorial and Pocket PC mail application roundup (which will be a kick-butt one, I can promise) instead. Still, I can't miss reporting on the new versions of Minimo, the promising, free, alternative Web browser. As version 0.014 will only be released considerably later, this will be my last Minimo report for quite a long time.
Where to get it from?
Check out the author's new blog, DougT's Ramblings (http://weblogs.mozillazine.org/dougt/) - it has all the links. I also copy them here:
CAB installer (http://www.meer.net/~dougt/minimo_ce/MinimoCE_0.013.cab)
ZIP'ed directory structure (http://www.meer.net/~dougt/minimo_ce/MinimoCE_0.013.zip) (3.8M, as opposed to the 9.8M of the CAB; just copy its contents into your file system)
Desktop EXE installer (http://www.meer.net/~dougt/minimo_ce/MinimoCE_0.013.exe)
Changes
There don't seem to be many changes, GUI-wise, compared to Release Candidate 2 (RC2 for short). There's a new button on the newly-introduced favorites bar on the left, http://www.winmobiletech.com/022006Minimo13/NewMinimo013FinalIcon.png, which takes you to the Yelp homepage (http://www.winmobiletech.com/022006Minimo13/NewMinimo013FinalYelp.bmp.png). The menus are, otherwise, exactly the same; so is the WM5 hardware key support.
Character encoding woes – some advanced stuff for HTTP gurus and developers of Minimo
Minimo, as has been pointed out in my previous two reviews, has never been able to render non-UTF-8 pages containing non-ASCII characters. I've played with this problem a bit and found out the following:
* If you overwrite (see screenshot 1 (http://www.winmobiletech.com/022006Minimo13/MinimoAcceptCharset.bmp.png) and 2 (http://www.winmobiletech.com/022006Minimo13/MinimoAcceptCharset-2.bmp.png)) the intl.accept_charsets property to "UTF-8" in the configuration window that comes up if you enter about:config in the address bar, nothing happens and the non-ASCII characters on non-UTF-8 pages are still not encoded properly. Note that the network.standard-url.escape-utf8, network.standard-url.encode-utf8 and network.http.accept-encoding properties here in about:config have nothing to do with what character set the server send backs the page.
* If you edit locale\en-US\minimo\minimo.properties in chrome/minimo.jar so that the intl.charset.default property reads ISO-8859-1 (or, 8859-1), nothing happens either.
* No matter what you do, Minimo never sends out the Accept-Charset HTTP header to the server; this means the latter will never know it should send back HTML pages encoded with UTF-8. (Please read this article (http://www.httpsniffer.com/http/1402.htm) for more information on the Accept-Charset header.) This is certainly a bug.
* If, however, you explicitly force Minimo to communicate via a HTTP proxy that adds this header (see for example my proxy server that does this – the source can be found here (http://www.winmobiletech.com/sekalaiset/AcceptCharsetHeaderInsertProxy.java)), most HTTP servers (checked with some, including the linked GeekZone article and the Jippii main page) still won't return a page encoded with UTF-8, resulting in the messed-up rendering of non-ASCII characters.
This all means the only way to make Minimo these non-UTF-8-encoded pages render properly is using an external proxy server that auto-converts HTML bodies to the new encoding. I'll rewrite my proxy server to support this - I'll keep you posted on the results when it's ready.
And yes, another bug... – caching doesn't work!
Much as the caching mechanism, at least as far as saving files and timestamping them, works OK, Minimo completely neglects using it. This means no If-Modified-Since HTTPrequest headers are sent out to the HTTP server – not even when you just click 'back' to a page you've just left. This all means the cache is useless in Minimo 0.013 and should not even be enabled. Also, you may really want to look for a properly caching browser instead to keep your communication costs down over expensive communication lines.
Recommended reading
Minimo 0.013 RC2 review (http://www.pocketpcmag.com/blogs/index.php?blog=3&p=552&more=1)
DougT's Ramblings (http://weblogs.mozillazine.org/dougt/) – the new blog of the developer of Minimo
Where to get it from?
Check out the author's new blog, DougT's Ramblings (http://weblogs.mozillazine.org/dougt/) - it has all the links. I also copy them here:
CAB installer (http://www.meer.net/~dougt/minimo_ce/MinimoCE_0.013.cab)
ZIP'ed directory structure (http://www.meer.net/~dougt/minimo_ce/MinimoCE_0.013.zip) (3.8M, as opposed to the 9.8M of the CAB; just copy its contents into your file system)
Desktop EXE installer (http://www.meer.net/~dougt/minimo_ce/MinimoCE_0.013.exe)
Changes
There don't seem to be many changes, GUI-wise, compared to Release Candidate 2 (RC2 for short). There's a new button on the newly-introduced favorites bar on the left, http://www.winmobiletech.com/022006Minimo13/NewMinimo013FinalIcon.png, which takes you to the Yelp homepage (http://www.winmobiletech.com/022006Minimo13/NewMinimo013FinalYelp.bmp.png). The menus are, otherwise, exactly the same; so is the WM5 hardware key support.
Character encoding woes – some advanced stuff for HTTP gurus and developers of Minimo
Minimo, as has been pointed out in my previous two reviews, has never been able to render non-UTF-8 pages containing non-ASCII characters. I've played with this problem a bit and found out the following:
* If you overwrite (see screenshot 1 (http://www.winmobiletech.com/022006Minimo13/MinimoAcceptCharset.bmp.png) and 2 (http://www.winmobiletech.com/022006Minimo13/MinimoAcceptCharset-2.bmp.png)) the intl.accept_charsets property to "UTF-8" in the configuration window that comes up if you enter about:config in the address bar, nothing happens and the non-ASCII characters on non-UTF-8 pages are still not encoded properly. Note that the network.standard-url.escape-utf8, network.standard-url.encode-utf8 and network.http.accept-encoding properties here in about:config have nothing to do with what character set the server send backs the page.
* If you edit locale\en-US\minimo\minimo.properties in chrome/minimo.jar so that the intl.charset.default property reads ISO-8859-1 (or, 8859-1), nothing happens either.
* No matter what you do, Minimo never sends out the Accept-Charset HTTP header to the server; this means the latter will never know it should send back HTML pages encoded with UTF-8. (Please read this article (http://www.httpsniffer.com/http/1402.htm) for more information on the Accept-Charset header.) This is certainly a bug.
* If, however, you explicitly force Minimo to communicate via a HTTP proxy that adds this header (see for example my proxy server that does this – the source can be found here (http://www.winmobiletech.com/sekalaiset/AcceptCharsetHeaderInsertProxy.java)), most HTTP servers (checked with some, including the linked GeekZone article and the Jippii main page) still won't return a page encoded with UTF-8, resulting in the messed-up rendering of non-ASCII characters.
This all means the only way to make Minimo these non-UTF-8-encoded pages render properly is using an external proxy server that auto-converts HTML bodies to the new encoding. I'll rewrite my proxy server to support this - I'll keep you posted on the results when it's ready.
And yes, another bug... – caching doesn't work!
Much as the caching mechanism, at least as far as saving files and timestamping them, works OK, Minimo completely neglects using it. This means no If-Modified-Since HTTPrequest headers are sent out to the HTTP server – not even when you just click 'back' to a page you've just left. This all means the cache is useless in Minimo 0.013 and should not even be enabled. Also, you may really want to look for a properly caching browser instead to keep your communication costs down over expensive communication lines.
Recommended reading
Minimo 0.013 RC2 review (http://www.pocketpcmag.com/blogs/index.php?blog=3&p=552&more=1)
DougT's Ramblings (http://weblogs.mozillazine.org/dougt/) – the new blog of the developer of Minimo