Browser updates in FroYo

As FroYo (Android 2.2) has been "released" for the Nexus One I opted to not wait for the OTA update and yesterday I installed it. The process was very easy and quite fast.

In the Google I/O conference they talked a bit about the new features, and those have been posted over and over again, so I just wanted to talk about the details in the browser.

Previously the User-Agent was

Mozilla/5.0 (Linux; U; Android 2.1-update1; es-es; Nexus One Build/ERE27) AppleWebKit/530.17 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/4.0 Mobile Safari/530.17

Now it's

Mozilla/5.0 (Linux; U; Android 2.2; es-es; Nexus One Build/FRF50) AppleWebKit/533.1 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/4.0 Mobile Safari/533.1

The scores at Acid3 and Html5Test remain the same (more about this later)

Animated gifs now work, and also <input type="file">, although its behavior it's a little strange: When you click it it prompts you to select the application to use: Gallery, Sound recorder, Ringdroid and Music track.

Gallery and Music track works as you expect: it shows their listings and you can pick up the file that you want. Sound recorder is also quite what you can expect: you get a simple sound recorder allowing to record, play and confirm the sound, but it doesn't allow to change any setting and the file is saved as .3gpp (AMR 8000Hz 12kbps)  in the root of the SD card. I didn't test for the moment to upload it, but refreshing the page leaves the file there, maybe it would have been better placed at the /tmp ? The other strange issue with this Sound recorder is that such app isn't available as a stand alone, why?

Finally Ringdroid, this means that other apps should be able to somehow appear in the list. When you pick Ringdroid it shows a file listing and when you select one, instead of going back to the browser it opens that file in Ringdroid, so you edit it and it becomes the selected one, but you can't pick an existing file without modification.

So now I hope that whatever API is required to use correctly this feature is properly documented so file managers like Astro are able to hook into it and we can use whatever file that we have on the SD card.

Lastly Flash. Yes, Flash 10.1 (beta) available in a mobile device: You go to the market, search for Adobe and install it. Then you can go to browse the web without any worry about if some feature was using it or no, you just use that page. And if you don't want to use it by default you just have to adjust the settings in the browser so add-ons aren't enabled by default so you see a green arrow and can click it to load that flash. Hey Apple-fans, how does that causes crashes or eat my battery?

As I was testing the html file upload I decided to give the flash part a go and it works partly: if the file mask is *.* then you can't pick any file (a "No file was found" message is shown), but if you restrict it to images ("*.jpg; *.jpeg; *.png") then it will show you a list of images and you can select the one that you want (yes, one one at a time). Isn't that weird? if you say that you only want images you get the file listing, but if you allow any file then you can't pick anyone.