Netfront 3.5- how well it works

I have now been playing with Netfront 3.5 from Access for a day and want to share my impressions of how well it works on the HTC Advantage.  The Advantage has a 5 inch VGA screen that screams for a good browser and so far Netfront is doing a pretty good job filling that bill.  It is important to realize that Access says this early version of 3.5 is a concept which means it’s not really a beta yet so you have to keep that in mind.  The installation of Netfront went without a hitch, I downloaded the CAB version directly to the Advantage and installed it without using a PC connection.  This went well although Netfront takes up almost 6 MB of memory for the install.  To give it a fair test I installed it to program memory and not one of the memory cards so the speed in operation will be the best it can be.  Just be aware that you need a lot of memory for the install.

Once I had Netfront installed it quickly became apparent that there are a lot of options that can tweak the browsing experience and I still haven’t figured out what they all do.  I used it for a fair bit with the default options and it works well, I find the speed of the browser to be good over both 3G and WiFi, both of which the Advantage can handle.  Pages render pretty quickly, although complicated pages like engadget flicker a few times before the page finishes rendering.  Once that is done I am finding that almost all pages look very much like their desktop equivalent and surfing the web is very satisfying with Netfront.  You can pan around big web pages by touch which works well.  As soon as you begin doing that an opaque indication appears on the right side of the screen that shows the entire page in thumbnail along with a rectangle that represents the displayed portion of the screen.  This lets you get a feel for where on the big page you currently are looking and this indicator goes away in a few seconds.  It comes back when you pan again so you always know where you are.  Panning is very smooth and only requires a light touch, in fact I find I often overshoot where I want to be and have to pan back up to the part of the page I passed.  It’s not a bad thing though, it’s better to be light touch than the opposite.

Netfront touts their smart zooming but I have to admit I don’t get it.  You can double-tap on a column and you get yet another thumbnail view of the page that pops up.  I find this to be an easy way to get to another part of the web page rather than a real zoom function as it doesn’t seem to change the zoom level at all.  It’s not a big issue because I find that Netfront does a really good job when rendering a page to get the main content column properly displayed to the width of the screen which minimizes the need for zooming anyway.  Still I’m not sure what they are trying to do with this "zoom" function since it doesn’t really do that.

One of the annoying things I find about Netfront, no doubt because it’s a very early version, is how you can’t turn off the notifications that occur when you enter or leave a secured web site.  These notifications pop up every time you do so and while most browsers let you turn these off I haven’t found a way to do so yet in Netfront.  It may be buried in all the options but I haven’t found it yet.  Some sites generate a lot of invalid certificates which also generate a lot of notification dialogs and I can’t turn these off either.  Not a big deal but it does interrupt the flow of browsing when they occur.

I mentioned that Netfront does a good job rendering most pages but for those pages that don’t the program provides no fewer than seven ways to render web pages.  In the browsing mode menu item you get these options:  Full Browsing, Text Browsing, Simple Browsing, and Rapid-Render.  Other than the Text Browsing option which turns off image display I can’t tell what the others do.  In the Display Mode menu you get these choices: Normal, Just-Fit Rendering and Smart-Fit Rendering.  I can’t really tell what these modes do differently either.  It’s clear that Access wanted the user to have total control of how pages are displayed and like any complicated program there is a lot of familiarization for the user to go through to get control over it.  Netfront handles JavaScript OK which can be turned off in the options but it doesn’t do Flash like YouTube.

I will probably do a video of Netfront in action at some point, I don’t have a good way to capture screen images of the program in action and quite frankly they won’t show much, just web pages being displayed.  I can state that Netfront handles VGA just fine and screen rotation works like a charm too.  Overall Netfront works better than the current version of Mobile Internet Explorer and Opera Mobile which I have been using on the Advantage and I’m pretty happy with it.  That said I am really looking forward to Opera’s release of the next version of Opera Mobile 9.5 this spring to see how it stacks up against Netfront.

UPDATE: I meant to point out that Netfront grabs and uses the Mobile Internet Explorer Favorites so you don’t have to import them to get going which is a nice touch.  That said, I have my Favorites organized into a bunch of sub-folders and while Netfront shows these folders there is no way to access the favorites within a sub-folder.  Be aware that if you do the same you will not be able to access the favorites in these folders.  Netfront by default displays the bookmarks in a visual scrolling interface which looks cool but is pretty useless until you visit each site which stores a thumbnail of the page.  Until you do that a generic icon is displayed for each web page and since there is no text to accompany this icon you can’t tell what your bookmarks are pointing to.  I turned this option off which then gives you a standard list of the bookmarks which is much more practical.

loading

Comments have been disabled for this post