Little test of Firefox 4 beta 3 for mobile

As Mozilla has just released Firefox 4 beta for mobile, and due to a talk this morning with Garry about editing in mobile I wanted to check how does it rate just in a quick test of contentEditable vs the default webkit-based browser.

The basic test at the previous post is enough for the initial checks and it doesn't require anything special, anyone can easily test if his browser includes the basic functionality expected in a modern browser.

Here's a testing area again:

Type here.., a link (it's part of the content, so it shouldn't be active)

First test: I click on the div and a caret shows up. Firefox 1, Webkit 0 (nothing signals that the editable zone has focus)

Second test: scrolling with the trackball moves the caret. Firefox 2, Webkit 0 (it scrolls the screen)

Third one: clicking on the link doesn't tries to open it. Firefox 3, Webkit 0 (it opens the linked Google page)

Fourth: The keyboard opens automatically when the div is focused. Firefox 4, Webkit 0 (You must open it by long pressing the Menu key)

Fifth: Typing (default keyboard) is slooow, very very slow. Firefox 4, Webkit 1 (in this page it works as fast as any other input field)

Sixth: Typing with Swiftkey, it tries to edit the contents, it's almost impossible to use it. 8pen seems to behave a little better. It seems that the Android browser tells the keyboard to send only single characters or to ignore autocomplete, I don't know how to explain it, but for this situation I think that using the Webkit method works better. Firefox 4, Webkit 2

Seventh: tweaking the CKEditor env.js file to allow the Android browser, we can test it in the full environment. The context menu opens/remains open at the 0x0 of the content, trying to type anything is almost impossible, the editor gets the focus, the keyboard opens and then it's closed automatically. Firefox 4, Webkit 3. The context menu doesn't show up and once the keyboard is forced it remains there. This could be something that can be tweaked in CKEditor, as the simple test doesn't behaves so badly.

Conclusion:

None of them are usable :-(

Maybe Firefox could be much better if it was able to select/configure the way that the keyboard opens, and then we should try to understand why it behaves that way in the full editor. Besides that, Firefox is still missing other features (the zoom function seems much worse than webkit) so we just need to be sure to fill a ticket with Firefox so they might fix it in the future.

Edit 1: I've filed bug 621438 for the Firefox problems with the keyboard.