Rap for KitKat in crap app wrap trap flap: Android 4.4 is 'meant to work like that' Google has rebuffed users and devs calling on the internet king to reinstate text wrapping, broken and replaced in Android 4.4 aka KitKat. The problem is that text displayed by web browsers using the WebView component isn't automatically laid out to fit on the screen of devices running the mobile OS, forcing users to zoom out …
I can confirm that zoom / reflow are badly broken in the Email client, and also that Opera Mini and Classic both work as expected. e.g. Properly, like they always have.
I have disabled the Android browser, and all of the other Google Play crud.
There aren't that many reasons to upgrade as far as I can see... Perhaps slightly better battery life. Hard to say as I've only had it since Sunday.
YMMV.
Ah, Google apparently wants to be Windows Phone compatible. The mobile IE browser has always behaved like that, and yes, it sucks. Sadly, Opera is not available on WP (before getting a Lumia,I always used Opera Mini on Symbian, which performed text reflow cleverly).
Opera Mobile for Symbian also managed text reflow properly (cleverly), had a tap-to-zoom that actually worked and finally had a single-column mode too. Everything that's come after that seems to be lacking in some way, even Opera for Android, unless they've put those features back into their WebKit browser.
Seems that the people who design the mobile browsers don't actually use them.
okay, there is one possible reason. Google wants the web to work the way it wants. So, mobile themes/designs for mobile users. It's perhaps a huge stick that might get the rest of the web to follow. I'm kind of surprised that reddit does not have a mobile theme (no, I've not taken the time to actually check).
Should we follow Google's every whim? Perhaps not. But a good mobile device design is hard to get working and so that's the bit that needs fixing.
The other thing is what John said. an excellent tap to zoom essentially renders desktop ads useless on a mobile device as you see the content and nothing else. Low click through rates means less income for the site and google.
That said, opera mini on kitkat works just like it always has: well. When on an underpowered device I can have 18 tabs open and the phone is usable, I consider that good engineering. Oh, and many advertising companies don't bother with Opera Mobile, which seems like a missed market, given it's 12% of mobile devices...
"The other thing is what John said. an excellent tap to zoom essentially renders desktop ads useless on a mobile device as you see the content and nothing else. Low click through rates means less income for the site and google."
On the other hand, if they effectively make web browsing (and, judging by other comments further up, reading emails and ebooks) difficult, less people are likely to use that function of their phones - which is therefore unlikely to increase click through rates; people won't be clicking on adverts they still won't be seeing. ISTM that Google are throwing the baby out with the bathwater, here.
Hmm. I looked up WebView and the Basic Usage section of that documentation says:
"By default, a WebView provides no browser-like widgets, does not enable JavaScript and web page errors are ignored. If your goal is only to display some HTML as a part of your UI, this is probably fine; the user won't need to interact with the web page beyond reading it, and the web page won't need to interact with the user. If you actually want a full-blown web browser, then you probably want to invoke the Browser application with a URL Intent rather than show it with a WebView." [emphasis added]
Is this a case of building applications with the wrong Android components?
I don't suppose you guys keep a scoreboard of the best titles of all time, based on some proprietary formula to determine cleverness by counting rhymes & alliterations, with bonus points for innuendo?
The only thing keeping this out of the all time top ten was the subtitle's complete and utter matter-of-factness. Surely there was some gold awaiting with the use of words such as Android, deployed, and fanboied?
Nah, it's horrible.
Whoever wrote the headline would be better off working for the Sun.
"Swedes 2 Turnips 1."
Now that's a headline to be proud of.
See this as a tutorial on headline writing:
http://bleacherreport.com/articles/1071875-20-hilarious-world-football-headlines
Nork splash shot snapped by passing satellite.
Orbiting pap pic shows duff commie rocket in flight
from the archives http://www.theregister.co.uk/2009/04/08/nork_rocket_snapped_in_flight/
Just the right balance of innuendo & technology... extra points would have been awarded for use of Jap's Island in there too, but maybe next time.
The problem I've found with Opera is with sites that are updated a lot.
Say, the mobile twitter site.
You go to click a link, but for some reason it gets the page layout of the latest page and clicks *that* region, rather than the original link.
Annoying, as it means you have to go back, refresh, find the link and select it again.
http://code.google.com/p/android/issues/detail?id=62378
1. Add star
2. ??
3. Profit
Go on star it, pretty please with sugar on top. If it get's on the first page of google code issues (sorted by stars) it'll get more visibility. Cant do any harm eh? It's already on page two.
El Reg seems to be confused with the term "deprecated". If NARROW_COLUMNS and SINGLE_COLUMN was deprecated, it would still work properly, just no guarantee it would work in the future. According to the Android development page, the feature was completely removed, not deprecated.
Without researching, I'm not sure if they previously deprecated these features, but if they didn't, it's a little brash for Google to remove an important feature out of the blue without any warning.
El Reg is only telling part of the story here. The reason this is happening in KitKat is because WebView now uses Chromium rather than the old Android Browser renderer. This allows for better, quicker layout but the consequence is that devs need to update a small bit of code to implement correctly.
No big issue.
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