Working On Mobile Webbrowser
rating: 0+–x

1239820923|%e %B %Y

As I noted before, I'm running Gentoo in chroot of my iPAQ H3870. As next step of fun with this PDA, I'm willing to create a mobile webbrowser for this (and other) Linux-powered mobile devices. Inspired by iPhone's Safari I want the browser to have the following features:

  • fast
  • easy to use

I want to use Qt and Webkit for this purpose. I will use PyQt for prototyping. As the interface will be minimal this should not add big overhead. For final version probably I'll compile C++ code statically (inserting the latest Qt library into the result program).

What features the browser should have and how I will implement them?

  • fast — using Webkit engine — well integrated with Qt 4.4+
  • fast — using fast JavaScript engine — one of newest Qt/Webkit's features using JIT
  • easy to use — full page zooming — using Qt/Webkit zoomFactor property
  • easy to use — kinetic scrolling — feature popular in iPhone GUI (already implemented by some Qt hackers)
  • fast — some hacky-features should be implemented like weight(-and-number-of-connections)-reducing proxy (like in Opera browser) and some AdBlock-like features (probably non-configurable)

I'm planning VERY minimal interface. No long-history, no bookmark management. Only a button to "save" a page to the browser's dashboard. Also I think about some cool internal things to really make the browser usable and to make it as good as the iPhone's browser.

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F**** cool!
SquarkSquark 1239870230|%e %b %Y, %H:%M %Z|agohover

I would really like to see your browser and test it! And I can help you with creating design and User Interaction if you want.

Pre-specification looks really promising. I would also think about compression of data (like Opera Turbo), which is especially important on mobile devices with on-air data transfer (even using HSDPA, while you mostly pay for the amount of send-received data).

Good luck with this project!

Łukasz Tarka
Project Manager / Community Manager
e-mail: moc.todikiw|zsakul#moc.todikiw|zsakul
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Unfold F**** cool! by SquarkSquark, 1239870230|%e %b %Y, %H:%M %Z|agohover
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Blog Author

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My name is Piotr Gabryjeluk.

I study at Nicolaus Copernicus University in Toruń, Poland.
I work for Wikidot Inc as a web architect, developer and designer.

I have my own About page here.

Page tags: gentoo@ipaq ipaq python qt webkit
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