Jolla News: Letter from Jolla, Open Source Sailfish browser

Sailfish OS is an Open Source project (sailfishos.org). On top of it, Jolla currently has a closed source user interface, but that's not the whole picture - according to Jolla, this situation is due to change in time.

With the latest update, Sailfish OS 1.0.3.8. Naamankajärvi, Jolla already introduced a new recovery menu which enables unlocking Jolla's bootloader. This was a step towards Open Source  - and today the story goes on. Letter from Vesa-Matti Hartikainen, Jolla Oy:

We finally got all the preparations done and today is the day. Sailfish Browser is Jolla's first fully open source application! The public repository is here: https://github.com/sailfishos/sailfish-browser We intend to work as open as possible and hope to gain contributors and a better chance of getting our embedding accepted to Mozilla upstream. Future contributions, both internal and external should go to the public repository. I hope that we will get a public bugzilla for this project at some point, but at the moment externally we will use Github's issue tracker. A more in depth description of the technology powering the browser can be found at http://blog.idempotent.info/posts/whats-behind-sailfish-browser.html. On behalf of Jolla's browser team I thank you all for being an awesome community and we are very much looking forward to building a great browser together! -- Vesa-Matti Hartikainen Jolla Oy

Open Source licence is added to the code already two weeks ago, but the letter above was published today. By this letter it's obvious that Jolla wishes to welcome more developers to contribute to the browser code, aiming to make it a full member of the Mozilla browsers main upstream. This would be a win win situation to both Jolla, their customers and mozilla.org.

Open Sourcing Sailfish browser was also expected because of the existing Gecko licence - Jolla's Sailfish browser uses Mozilla’s Gecko engine, and it's embedded with EmbedLite API.

News about Open Source Sailfish Browser has been welcome. Information was first published at Maemo developer forum, since then it's already reached at least:

• GIGAOM
• The Next Web
• CNN Money
• Several Jolla community sites, blogs and forums

Grants, by the licence of Sailfish Browser

Each Contributor hereby grants You a world-wide, royalty-free, non-exclusive license:

1. under intellectual property rights (other than patent or trademark) Licensable by such Contributor to use, reproduce, make available, modify, display, perform, distribute, and otherwise exploit its Contributions, either on an unmodified basis, with Modifications, or as part of a Larger Work; and
2. under Patent Claims of such Contributor to make, use, sell, offer for sale, have made, import, and otherwise transfer either its Contributions or its Contributor Version.

(note: for conditions, read the full licence http://www.mozilla.org/MPL/2.0/)

webCat, Sailfish browser for Jolla Smartphone supporting landscape

Leszek Lesner has coded an alternative webCat browser for Jolla. It's a native SailfishOS browser, and it's available for download either at github, openrepos or at Jolla Store. I downloaded it from Jolla Store, and here's a review to version 0.8.3. Let's begin with a video by Leszek:

Features

• Landscape support
• Tabbing support (real without reloading of tabs)
• Bookmark support
• Setting browser user agent
• Setting default font sizes
• Opening up links in new tab (by long press and hold on link)
• Copy links (by long press and hold on link)
• Open rtsp, rtmp and mms links with external viewer (e.g. LLs VideoPlayer)
• Setting DNS Prefetch
• Setting Offline WebApplication Cache
• Manually add bookmark with specific user agent
• Fast scroll to top or bottom of page

Review

The settings: First image is from the pulley menu, from where the settings can be found. Second image shows another pulley menu inside the settings.

Images below show all available settings. The most interesting one is the possibility to change the user agent. User agent is a line of text sent to the server, by that the server selects the content and layout which is sent back to the browser screen. webCat browser can act as an Sailfish, Android, Nokia, Firefox, IE, Opera, Blackberry, NTT Docomo or any custom browser you select. This feature enables e.g. accessing mobile or desktop view of the page.

Last image above shows the bookmarks. Some are there already, selected by the coder (thanks for including Review Jolla), and more can be saved by the user. Bookmarks can't be edited, but they can be removed with a hold gesture, and new ones are saved either via settings (including the wanted user agent) or via the browser window:

These two images shows an example of using google map directions with webCat. On the left, a screenshot of the map, and on the right, screenshot from the list of directions while scrolling it up. While scrolling, a tap button to quicky reach the top of the page appears to the top right corner. Another tap button appears when scrolling down, likewise to reach the end of the page.


On the footer bar you can see a button for entering tabs/bookmarks, a back button, the url where you currently are, and a star to add the page as a bookmark/favourite.


Tap on the url brings up the virtual keyboard, from where you can also refresh the page.


Tap on any free (linkless) spot on the page minimizes the footer bar to a very small one, right to the edge of your screen. Bringing it back requires some good aiming. You can barely see the footer on the image on the right.


When the tap hits the footer, sometimes you still see it as minimized above the keyboard. It should be tapped again to bring it to its normal size.


Entering youtube brings me up to the only bug I found. At least the version downloaded from the Store can't play videos. Not in youtube, not in html5. Some user agents were able to show the cover image of a video and play the sound. On the Leszek's video introduction, however, we can see a youtube video running nicely - so there's probably a fixable issue conserning the store. Looking forward for an update.

The most wanted feature for the original Jolla browser has been the landscape support. In webCat, landscape is fully supported, as you can see in the first image of this article (browsing jolla.com)