The E73 Browser Dissected
By Dennis Bournique
mardi 31 août 2010 @ 22h

---

This is a continuation of my Nokia E73 "Mode" reveiew. Here's a look at the built in WebKit based Nokia browser. I've been using an N95-3 as my main phone for years so I'm pretty familiar with the Symbian browser.  But  the browser in  Feature Pack 2 (FP2) devices like  the E73 is quite a bit newer.  The E73's is version 7.2, based on  WebKit; 525. The N95's browser is based on the much older  WebKit 413.  Here's the full User Agent for those who track such things:

Mozilla/5.0 (SymbianOS/9.3; Series60/3.2 NokiaE73/043.001; Profile/MIDP-2.1 Configuration/CLDC-1.1 ) AppleWebKit/525 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/3.0 BrowserNG/7.2.6 3gpp-gba

The FP2 browser has gotten some good reviews.  All About Symbian's  Rafe Blandford did some speed tests and found that the browser on theN86, which is also version 7.2, was approximately three times faster than the one on the FP1 N95 8GB. On the other hand, the E75, another FP2 device which has a slightly older version 7.1 browser, was only 50% faster than the N95. In fact, its performance was only a little better than the FP1 E71.  Based on my own testing, using the same sites that Rafe used, I found the E73's  performance falls in between that of the N86 and E75.  It was a bit over twice as fast than the N95, certainly a nice performance improvement. The table below has the raw numbers.

Site	Nokia N95-3	Nokia E73
google.co.uk	4	3
theregister.co.uk	21	16
theguardian.co.uk	51	26
digg.com	26	13
techreport.com	50	20
bbc.mobi (mobile)	28	8
en.wikipedia.org	35	10
nytimes.com (mobile)	9	7
thetimes.co.uk (mobile)	11	9
youtube.com	28	12
TOTAL	263	124

I discovered  a nice little usability enhancement in this version of the browser. There are three new default shortcut keys; the 6 key reloads the page, the 7 key toggles full screen mode, and the 5 key brings up a handy shortcut key map (image top, left). Plus all the keyboard shortcuts are now customizable (image top, right).  You can choose 19 different actions to assign to the twelve keys available keys (the numbers plus * and #). My only beef is that there are still no shortcuts for page up and page down, two functions I consider almost essential for quickly scanning text on a page.

HTML5 and CSS3 support in the Symbian browser is still rather limited.  It supports ,

and