I’m off to Paris for 6 days to follow the Magic: the gathering Worlds tournament with some friends.
I’ll be blogging using my DS lite’s Browser, which thankfully works fine with the site’s aged back-end.
The Opera-based Browser renders most sites perfectly, even those with lots of AJAX such as the .Mac Webmail. However it has a ridiculous inability to display ‘large’ images. This basically makes it impossible to load any of my webcomics on the go, apart from Scott Kurtz’s monochrome PvP Online. It’s such a feeble decision on the designer’s part since the browser comes with its own freakin’ extra-memory pack! Is it too hard just to give me a option to load the big images? Or at the very least load them fully if I link right to them?
Graphics heavy sites load fine but anytime a Jpeg or Gif is larger than 300 or so pixels the DS browser will just render them in with some disgusting interlacing.
It also renders dog-slow. Even though you don’t need to use PDA website layouts, you feel like you ought to take advantage of any site with them since it cuts down the load times. This device is running on a wireless broadband network for pete’s sake! It’s an ARM processor in there, ARM processors are not weaklings. Perhaps the device really can’t support a decent paced browser but I’m willing to bet that you can do a lot better than Opera’s effort.
I fully expect the Homebrew Okiwi to outstrip it in a few month’s time.
6 days without Webcomics. (Unless I find a way to automate chopping the images into bitesized chunks and lacing them together using CSS, which will of course load fine since that wouldn’t fall under the entirely arbitrary thresholds imposed on the Browser) What will I do?
Au revoir tout les monde!
John
Posted by John Swaine at November 27, 2006 03:20 PM