Did any of you sailors tested the general usability of this forum with default SFOS browser?
Just spent a few minutes here and it feels like …
lots of overlays, frames moving around, address bar in the way, and most annoying: keyboard overlays the text field so typing blind 
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Looks like angelfish wins here (e.g.) no problems with replying: text box jumps on top of screen, keyboard beneath…
[update] - not amaz, angel…
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Edit: I’m tired and didn’t notice the topic this was posted into. I assumed it was general feedback about the browser
Personally, my biggest pain points with the browser are the following (ordered from most annoying to least):
- The address bar overlays accept buttons on GDPR popups
- More general: the address bar overlays elements with
position: fixedset. It would be nice if elements styled withposition: fixed; bottom: 0would touch the top of the address bar if visible or the bottom of the window if the address bar is invisible.
- More general: the address bar overlays elements with
- Browser crashes after a while when browsing on sites with many images, like image boards, after browsing it for a while
- For example: https://steambanners.booru.org/index.php and other boards using the same image board software
- Zooming out too much will blank the page until it is reloaded
- Not being up to date with recents web standards
- Recently I needed to fill in a Captcha for archive.is (probably due to CloudFlare) (and I already dislike Captcha’s) but it was impossible because half of the images were offscreen.
This one isn’t the fault of the browser, but it really bothered me today:
-
A forum (https://www.ps2-home.com/forum/) has blocked me solely for using an uncommon user agent string. Because they wanted to block bots and scrapers.Surely people with malicious intents will give up after their malicious bot with the user agent “Mozzarella/6.0 (NotEvilEdition;Unlicensed) LammerBot/42.0” got blocked by their website.
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Yes, the experience could be better… the loading is slow and right now I’m blindly writing this very post because the edit window is covered by the virtual keyboard… it’s sad that the browser doesn’t even support properly the forum, this gives an idea of how much late browser developement is
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IMO an app is not a substitute for a well-working web page. Apps should be reserved for use cases requiring background tasks, or more advanced APIs, including non-http network access.
The speed isn’t that horrible, but that layout issue is a real blocker.
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Now I put some post and it asked me something about ‘complete sentence’?
I could not even read that popup nor dismiss it in portrait mode, needed to switch to landscape and could only barely toich some guessed OK button (no odea to what I pressed okay).
It really startsbto make me angry 
And gives the feeling no one from Jolla really ises their OS and their crippled apps
And I will NOT correct typos with this bad keyboard when I eveen do not see what I am mistyping!
EDIT
now I got blocked for creating posts!
basic user (Ibdo not feel like basic, awwhat about taking over karma or so?)
why should I be blocked for 4 hours???
Really sorry for typos, but …
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But t seems that they at least tuned the user agent detection to allow the sailfish browser to work at all.
With the latest version of WebCat by @leszek you are even not alllowed to login! 
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It seems the next Sailfish release (or the one after that) will at least have Gecko 52 instead of 45, but considering Firefox 78 (ESR) was just released, that’s a looong way to go. Please, hire more people to work on updating the browser engine. It’s become almost impossible to browse any kind of website with these long outdated versions of Gecko…
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I get you point, but IMO an app could implement a native style with our loved Silica-components. This would integrate nicely in the whole system as long as we don’t have web apps. Additionally one could have cool features like multiple forums with one app…
Either you don’t get my point, or more likely… I don’t get your point.
I’m genuinely curious, what makes it better being an app? What integration do you need? As an app developer myself i sure wouldn’t like to re-implement a web page just for the looks. The maintenance need makes me feel uneasy just thinking about it. The “cool feature” of multiple forums comes standard in any web browser.
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“The full Safari engine is inside of iPhone. And so, you can write amazing Web 2.0 and Ajax apps that look exactly and behave exactly like apps on the iPhone. And these apps can integrate perfectly with iPhone services. They can make a call, they can send an email, they can look up a location on Google Maps. And guess what? There’s no SDK that you need!”
-Steve Jobs, 2007
The mobile application development world has come full circle. When Steve Jobs took the stage at the Apple 2007 WWDC, he announced that the iPhone would not need native apps because everything could be written for Javascript/HTML. Developers were not happy. Fast forward 11 or 12 years, and now app developers are perfectly content to write “apps” for mobile platforms that are little more than JS/HTML.
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From another topic:
Since few people mentioned a native client in this thread and the speed this forum loads on jolla C is atrocious (and no way to use flatpak on these older devices)… I’ve changed a couple of URLs in my old app and now it seems to somewhat work with this forum:
https://openrepos.net/content/szopin/sfos-forum-viewer
probably very buggy, but the source is available (https://github.com/szopin/harbour-sfos-forum-viewer) so hopefully can be fixed
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My problem is less the web page itself, but the way I can use it with SF. I need 1 swipe and 4 clicks (swipe to app grid, open Browser, wait a long time until it opens, burger menu, new tab, bookmark) to open a web page I bookmarked in the browser. Next I have to enter my credentials, which is always a pain on mobile, because I am using a KeePass-password safe and have to copy username and password one by one every time the login is forgotten. But this is complaining on a high comfort level for sure.
All this does not really require a native app, more a good-working web browser and web apps.
So maybe the only - but very weak - argument is, that the design would better match with the rest of the system. But I am here with you - a re-implementation (with the ongoing work it produces) is not really worth it.
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Well that didn’t take long 
Could we have it in Harbour as well?
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Sure, there’s one issue I want to fix today and will submit it (outside of the ugly as hell icon, but hoping some sailors can help with this)
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Submitted 0.3 to QA, not fully tested as the forum seems to have some form of rate limiting and started hitting this error recently:
| errors | |
|---|---|
| 0 | “You’ve performed this action too many times, please try again later.” |
When it happens the threads view is stuck on ‘Loading…’ and it seems to happen on both the emulator (landline) and on phone with mobile connection at the same time, so it’s not an IP ban? Probably more users affected, hard to tell 
Might need to add some kind of error handling in a future version
edit: seems to be related to using ?print=true in the URL so as to pull all posts at the same time and also related to being logged in or out, this URL works in browser where I’m logged in: First comment on the new Sailfish OS Forum but in new private window throws the abovementioned error
edit: different way of pulling more posts implemented in 0.4, shouldn’t cause issues as it mimics how browsers pull extra content
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And another one:
when trying to copy a link from a post into the clipboard for further usage!
This is just not possible with SFOS browser due to the forum will automatically open a text box and Sailfish is 7y later still not able to select/copy text from within a text box in the browser.
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