Jibbering Musings

I’ve been creating some HTML pages designed to work on a blackberry, but only on the version 4 of the browser, which claims to be extremely powerful. I’d no idea what to expect of the browser, all I’d ever seen on blackberry’s was people reading green monochrome text or black text on a white screen. The Blackberry 4 browser however did nice on my site straight out of the box on a Blackberry 7100 or a blackberry 7290 .

Images are loaded, but only up to a certain kb size, above that it shows placeholders with the ALT text in it, the rescaling algorithms don’t look too bad and the rendering seems a little sharper and faster than the Opera 6 on my Nokia 3650, although the 3650 is a very weak platform, slow, with little memory, so it’s not a very fair test.

So the browser is nicely capable of showing pictures, and css styles. Some script testing showed that it also had javascript support and some DOM 0 like objects. Throwing it a more random page, showed that it doesn’t know about CSS descendent selectors, easy to work around, and rarely relevant to the accessibility of a page. Simple tables were linearised in row, column order, and 100% widths on TD’s were expanded to full width of the page, but some sites I found with tables ended up with very squashed text, I think if you don’t have a set width on tables, they can end up only 1 character wide, this could be a problem with some forms of content, hopefully I won’t need to do it. float:left|right seemed to be ignored, which was useful as it allowed me to easily move the boring left menu web stuff under the main content in the blackberry.

All in all, I was very impressed with the capabilities of it, for a free included browser it stands up extremely well to various averagely coded web pages. Next I’m going to start properly testing the script and DOM capabilities, then I need to look into the claimed SVG abilities.