Tell HN: Amazon Kindle's browser is not experimental anymore | Hacker News Reader

Tell HN: Amazon Kindle's browser is not experimental anymore

Amazon has made some major UI changes with the latest Kindle firmware 5.13.7, the browser has finally moved out of experimental status and is now just called Web Browser.

Amazon's official change log for Kindle software updates is useless as always and so there's no real technical information on what has changed with the browser but it does seem bit more responsive, So does other parts of Kindle.

I read HN on my Kindle and JS rich sites like TechCrunch wouldn't load properly in the earlier Kindle experimental browser but loads great now (incl. Article mode).

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I grew up using their experimental web browser for some of my first internet experiences. I got my first Kindle in 2010 when I was 11, signed up for Twitter on it when it still had the cloud background.

It used to work great for almost the whole internet. Not being able to open links that opened in a new tab was a big annoyance, it just refused with an error message.

> I got my first Kindle in 2010 when I was 11, signed up for Twitter on it when it still had the cloud background.

It tells both about how light websites were and that you were a patient kid (both great qualities). Only websites which could be logged in with Kindle experimental browser nowadays are HN type minimalist websites.

It was surprisingly snappy, particularly compared to the Nintendo DSi web browser which I also spent a lot of time with.

The internet truly was lighter and had less JavaScript back then. I remember Tumblr working very well on the experimental Kindle browser.

Ironically, After a couple of days of use the new Web Browser opens every website like full fledged browser, Even retains authentication cookie except (drum roll) Twitter!

Twitter just shows a button 'Try Again', What a tragedy.

As a side note, after years of bad-mouthing their ebook reading software, I have to admit that they've made substantial improvements lately, esp. in the handling of mathML and SVG images. Even tables don't suck quite as badly. still no scripting, but that doesn't come up so much in an ebook context anyway.

Does MathML work well only with KFX format or does other formats support MathML too now?

Not sure, I assume not with the old mobi format, which is now deprecated by Amazon. Now they take a submitted file in standard epub format and they manage the conversion. If it works in the Previewer, you're good.

I haven’t updated due to my jailbreak. Is this update available for the PW3? And is the browser still based on WebKit?

PW3 does support latest update[1], If you're using jailbreak to set book cover as screensaver then it's available by default, But if you have Linux shell on your Kindle then I feel that the jailbreak is more valuable than anything Amazon brings with SW update.

The browser engine is WebKit, it detects either as Fire OS 3 browser or Safari 5 on my Oasis 9th gen.

[1] https://www.amazon.com/gp/help/customer/display.html?nodeId=...

Safari 5: June 7, 2010

This is the User agent from amiunique.org,

Mozilla/5.0(X11;U;Linux armv7l like Android; en-us) AppleWebKit/531.2+(KHTML, like Gecko) Version/5.0 Safari/533.2+ Kindle/3.0+

Would someone updated do a https://html5test.com/ ?

Here you go - https://imgur.com/gallery/hiU0QQl

I would really like a comparison with with the browsers from much powerful e-paper tablets like reMarkable, Boox etc.

Edit: https://imgur.com/a/hiU0QQl

Awesome!

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