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Sailfish Browser - Almost impossible to navigate(1.1.9.28) [answered]

asked 2015-09-09 17:37:51 +0300

Spam Hunter gravatar image

updated 2016-08-17 11:29:28 +0300

jiit gravatar image

Edit 13/09/2015 - Problem solved, for me at least. See my answer further down the page - thanks for the input guys, especially @tworaz for prompting me to check the output of starting sailfish-browser in terminal.

Original question - Fire up Sailfish Browser and look for the toolbar!, it's like playing 'Where's Wally!", the entire browser background is white at first, then the page starts loading, by showing a pale coloured loading bar sweeping from left to right and then pop!, the toolbar is invisible once again, especially if the webpage you're viewing has a white background.

It's not just the visibility of the toolbar, the whole UI of the browser has become a real muddle and hard to use.

Some screenshots from different webpages I use regularly;

New Tab - barely readable (The First One ambience loaded)

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Opening a New Tab; What's happened here?, what a mess, any text/toolbar on the screen (and there is text) is virtually invisible.

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My eBay;

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Google search;

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All in all, a bit of a dog's dinner, wouldn't you say? ;)

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The question has been closed for the following reason "the question is answered, an answer was accepted" by simo
close date 2015-09-14 00:41:58.504226

Comments

1

Funny, I have a similar bug - but the background is full black here. For some reason the browser doesn't seem to pick the ambience background...

g7 ( 2015-09-09 17:41:00 +0300 )edit

A black background eh, that's even more strange. I went through all ambiences, old, new and home-made, bu t nearly every aspect of the browser has stayed virtually invisible. I'm we'll be seeing a quick upgrade/bug fix quite soon ~ we hope.

Spam Hunter ( 2015-09-09 17:44:15 +0300 )edit

Browser's black for me, and I think that's how it's supposed to be. No idea what's up with your browser.

nthn ( 2015-09-09 17:50:14 +0300 )edit

Already rebooted? :D

Alex ( 2015-09-09 17:56:00 +0300 )edit

@nthn: I don't think it's how it's supposed to be. It's inconsistent with pretty much every other Sailfish application.

g7 ( 2015-09-09 17:57:13 +0300 )edit

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answered 2015-09-09 18:33:15 +0300

tworaz gravatar image

updated 2015-09-09 18:37:19 +0300

What you describe looks like a bug. It's not how the browser should look like in 1.1.9. As others have mentioned there should be a black transparent background under most UI elements. If you could try to start the browser from the terminal and post the resulting log somewhere I'd really appreciate it.

This whole change in the UI look for the browser was something we had to do in order to improve rendering performance, especially scrolling smoothness. Most people probably won't notice this because on the phone it wasn't so bad. Unfortunately the old rendering method we used did not scale well. The performance was not acceptable on the tablet (less than 20fps when scrolling simple pages). The new architecture uses HW layers to draw the web content and the UI is overlayed on top of it. If people not affected by this bug take a closer look, they should see that the contents of the page are visible under the navigation bar background. In older browser versions this worked almost the same, but instead of the web window you could see home screen background image. There was no layer between the UI and the home screen. Right now we have stack with home->web content->browser ui.

On another note some people will also notice that right now when tab view is activated the web content is not animated offscreen as it used to be in pre 1.1.9 versions. This difference in behavior was also introduced due to the rendering architecture changes.

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Hi @tworaz - I'm currently in the middle of updating from the initial 1.1.9.27 to 1.1.9.28 - I think this will help. I'll be reporting back asap. Thanks for your response!

Spam Hunter ( 2015-09-09 18:36:04 +0300 )edit

That's very interesting and I've definitely seen the performance boost, thanks for sharing. Also by taking a closer look I confirm that the content of the page is visible under the navigation bar, but I guess it should be a bit more transparent to be appreciated better.

g7 ( 2015-09-09 18:42:22 +0300 )edit
1

Well, this is a matter for another debate. IMO there is no reason that the default background color for the browser UI has to be black. I don't really remember why it was decided to go with a fixed black bg by default. My guess is this even might change again in the future.

tworaz ( 2015-09-09 18:49:54 +0300 )edit
2

answered 2015-09-13 17:12:25 +0300

Spam Hunter gravatar image

Problem solved - at least for myself!

I started Sailfish Browser in Terminal and studied the output. It didn't take long for me to realise what had happened and why the browser behaved like it did.

Inside /usr/share/themes/jolla-ambient/meegotouch/icons, there are some texture files (.png) which I had renamed in order to make them not show (this worked fine in 1.1.7.28), items like graphic-shader-texture.png / graphic-system-gradient.png / graphic-gradient-corner.png / graphic-gradient-edge.png. I renamed these files under previous SFOS releases in order to make the home and multi-tasking view brighter, but clearly this has an effect on Sailfish Browser under 1.1.9.28.

With all the relevant files renamed back to .png insteaed of .old, I now have a normal looking browser!, I now wonder if 6 other users who voted, have played with the same files I did!..?

Regards,

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Good to know it's not some obscure bug in the browser UI. Hopefully the remaining 6 people did exactly the same thing :).

tworaz ( 2015-09-14 12:59:07 +0300 )edit

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Asked: 2015-09-09 17:37:51 +0300

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Last updated: Sep 13 '15