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> The Kindle can’t even display web pages well! Its browser is slow and bad, though if you do manage to navigate to a page with an article on it, you can enter

by danso 7y ago

> The Kindle can’t even display web pages well! Its browser is slow and bad, though if you do manage to navigate to a page with an article on it, you can enter “Article Mode” and have a mediocre reading experience. This statement is made as if the author thinks rendering the contemporary web is a trivial achievement.

mcherm 7y ago
It IS trivial. Now, I'll admit that there is an enormously complex process required to render modern html and css properly. But there are several engines that do this rendering and are available as open source. So it is easy to render web pages... use one of these engines.
- danso 7y ago
  What examples are you thinking? Are you talking about Chrome and Webkit, and that these would be trivial for a Kindle to adopt? The Kindle Oasis is the highest spec Kindle, and it tops out at 512MB RAM. I see that Firefox 70.0 has 512MB for its minimum requirements, but how performant is that kind of computer on today's web?
  - notus 7y ago
    With the example of Firefox, you wouldn't use Firefox, you would use Gecko which is going to have much lower requirements. There are usually ports for embedded systems that have even less requirements as well (WPE for Webkit for example)
- falcolas 7y ago
  So, just to render a mobi file, a HTML / CSS (2.0) renderer is needed. So, minus JavaScript and some particularly fancy CSS, the Kindle is already most of the way there.
Shorel 7y ago
There's no reason to use Android for the operating system of an e-reader, except to leverage the browser technology. And e-readers use Android, but the technology is used with the bare minimum amount of effort. One very obvious change is to implement scrolling one page at a time, instead of a very slow slide-show of unreadable text until it finishes scrolling several seconds later. So, yes, it can't even display web pages well, because they don't try to modify the browser for the medium at all!

by danso 7y ago

mcherm 7y ago

It IS trivial. Now, I'll admit that there is an enormously complex process required to render modern html and css properly. But there are several engines that do this rendering and are available as open source. So it is easy to render web pages... use one of these engines.

danso 7y ago
What examples are you thinking? Are you talking about Chrome and Webkit, and that these would be trivial for a Kindle to adopt? The Kindle Oasis is the highest spec Kindle, and it tops out at 512MB RAM. I see that Firefox 70.0 has 512MB for its minimum requirements, but how performant is that kind of computer on today's web?
- notus 7y ago
  With the example of Firefox, you wouldn't use Firefox, you would use Gecko which is going to have much lower requirements. There are usually ports for embedded systems that have even less requirements as well (WPE for Webkit for example)
falcolas 7y ago
So, just to render a mobi file, a HTML / CSS (2.0) renderer is needed. So, minus JavaScript and some particularly fancy CSS, the Kindle is already most of the way there.

Shorel 7y ago

There's no reason to use Android for the operating system of an e-reader, except to leverage the browser technology. And e-readers use Android, but the technology is used with the bare minimum amount of effort. One very obvious change is to implement scrolling one page at a time, instead of a very slow slide-show of unreadable text until it finishes scrolling several seconds later. So, yes, it can't even display web pages well, because they don't try to modify the browser for the medium at all!