In about:config add this setting ui.caretBlinkTime of type integer. Then set the number to how many milliseconds between blinks.

250 is very quick, 500 is about normal. I tend to go for about 400. Set it to 0 if you don't want it to blink at all. Click the ✅ button and your caret blink speed will immediately change.

You can see more configuration options in the source code.

The HTML autocomplete attribute is available on <input> elements that take a text or numeric value as input, <textarea> elements, <select> elements, and <form> elements. autocomplete lets web developers specify what if any permission the user agent has to provide automated assistance in filling out form field values, as well as guidance to the browser as to the type of information expected in the field. https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTML/Attributes/autocomplete

In plain English - your browser remembers your email address and presents it in a drop-down box when you try to log in to a service.

That's pretty cool, right? It's useful for accessibility. And there are a bunch of "hints" to help the browser know what data to fill in - so it doesn't accidentally put your postal address where your email address should go.

One of these hints is one-time-code. The theory is, your browser can auto-fill the <input> with a two-factor-authentication code. A phone's browser might automatically grab the 2FA when it receives an SMS. Or a desktop browser might see the code in the user's clipboard. Clever, huh?

But...

The thing about one-time codes is that they're designed to be used once. A code is typically valid for around 60 seconds. After that, it's useless. The service will refuse you entry and ask for another code. So there is no point having the browser remember the code to let you re-use it later.

And yet...

Firefox and Chrome both remember 2FA codes and "helpfully" show them in a dropdown. Why?

There is no world where a user would want to re-enter the same 2FA code. If they mistyped the code the first time, showing it again isn't helpful. There is close to zero chance of a previous 2FA code being the same as my current 2FA code. Remembering 2FA codes is a bug, not a feature.

I'm not the first to notice this:

Kai Hendry

@kaihendry

Is whatwg.org/html some sort of lost skill? @github pic.x.com/9WJD1FbOzx

---

Dave Marshall

@davedevelopment

This irritates me far more than it should. If you're coding up a 2FA form, autocomplete=off please 👍 pic.x.com/jXBRithoH5

---

UX Opportunities 🟠 User Experience Advice

@UXOpportunities

Auto-complete on OTP fields shouldn't show past codes, @ChromiumDev, surely?
Do other #browsers do this?

#ux #userexperience #uxfail #wtfux

This #UXOpportunity courtesy of @github's #2FA page, which correctly uses `autocomplete="one-time-code"` pic.x.com/fyci5H63ze

---

Lynn (finally free)

@chordbug

As a…
→ user with 2FA enabled

I want…
→ the 6-digit password field to have autocomplete

So that I can…
→ save time whenever I win the 2FA lottery

---

In fact, I've been ranting about this since 2014.

Please - browser manufacturers and spec writers - do some user research to see if the feature you're developing is useful to real-life users.

Web browsers are often called a User Agent. They are a software agent acting on behalf of their user. So what happens when the browser acts against the interest of their user?

This isn't a theoretical question - there's a long history of browsers which betray the user.

Windows Phone 7 had a web browser that wouldn't let users download unprotected MP3s.

Symbian did something similar. If a file didn't have OMA compliant protection, the browser wouldn't open it. Deliberately ignoring the user.

In fact, Symbian went even further than that in disobeying instructions. Some Symbian phones wouldn't let you send an MP3 by Bluetooth or MMS. Why? Because the phone company didn't want to lose ringtone revenue. The customer of the phone manufacturer was not the end user; it was the phone network.

Blackberry's browser at one time had an artificial download limit of 3MB. No technical reason, just to stop users getting files from unofficial sources.

I'm going to keep banging on about this - the browser is the User's Agent. It is meant to work on behalf of the user. That's why you can change a page's style sheet, or block ads, or zoom in.

Protection

But the browser also has to protect the user. That's why you see warnings about entering your password on non-HTTPS sites. The User-Agent sometimes has to stop the user from doing something dangerous.

Can this be extended? Should the browser "protect" the user against non-DRM files?

Can you imagine that on every Soundcloud page? Or when sharing a video of your friends? Or on any media page without a © declaration?

Is this the future of browsers? Perhaps. Most browsers are made by media companies - or at least companies which make a lot of money selling audio and video content.

Does the browser work for the user, or the company that makes it?

Here's a quick run-down of its features.

HTML5

A fairly miserable score of 268 out of 555 points on http://html5test.com/ The screen is 1280*480 with good visibility. It's slow to scroll and, even with the touchpad controller, a pain to navigate.

User Agent

It reports as this unholy mess. Chrome 15 on Windows XP. Helpful! Oh, the IP address is in Germany because - I presume - that's where BMW's proxy is. Connectivity is provided by Vodafone's 3G network.

Security

The browser kept popping up with this certificate error. I'm not sure if it's the proxy, or the browser which is causing the failure to validate certificates.

Options

There is an options menu. Cookies are blocked by default, there's a flash player! Flash! In the car! I ticked the "sound" option and visited an HTML5 sound test page. MP3 is supported. Impressively, so are Ogg and WebM!

Video

Some HTML5 video is supported - although playback is a bit jerky. Audio support is variable.

So, let's try out YouTube - the biggest video site on the planet!

Well, that's underwhelming. I wonder what is up with the Flash player on this thing.

A quick (slow) visit to Adobe shows us part of the problem -

An ancient Flash version. Which means you can expect to see a lot of things like:

Tabs

One thing that surprised me was the ability to have multiple tabs. Considering how slow the browser is, it's useful to load up a site in one, then read another tab while waiting for it to load.

Open too many tabs (3 in this case) and you get this somewhat confusing error message.

There's no obvious way to close a tab...

You can always go into your history to see what you were reading before the browser flamed out.

Headers and Proxy

A fairly sparse set of headers are sent by the UA.

The proxy is by M-Way Solutions. I'm not sure if it's the proxy, or Vodafone, but there is some severe picture compression going on:

Rendering

For regular web pages, the rendering is competent - if slow. Here's my blog:

CSS rounded corner and webfonts all work.

But there is a glaring omission. The Unicode support from the browser is atrocious. Want to view Emoji? This is what you'll see -

☹

Overall

This is a shitty browser. It's slow - and that's not the fault of the 3G network - rendering takes forever, scrolling is awkward, mouse pointer precision is poor, and has limited support for modern web technologies. Along with the frequent SSL certificate warnings, the UA is probably vulnerable to modern attacks.

If you want to pay £95 per year to browse the web while sat in a motorway service station, I suggest you buy a cheap Android tablet and a PAYG SIM. Browsing will be a lot less frustrating, and you won't have to put up with seeing this error message constantly.

But, apart from that, the i3 is a great car!

When scrolling, I notice that the font hinting seems to break down. This makes the text very "juddery". It looks like the fonts shrink and grow and they scroll. This is very disorienting when reading.

In this example I've noticed that once I've stopped scrolled the page, the fonts are hinted differently.

I've enlarged the examples (without interpolation) so you can see them a bit more clearly.

To give you a good idea of what's happening, I've magnified the letter "e" (again, without interpolation). You can quite clearly see what happens to the font.

I can understand why the font hinting changes as the scrolling occurs - but why does it change even after scrolling has finished?

All screenshots taken on an N7100 running 4.1.2 with the latest version of Chrome for Android. The Galaxy Note II has a fairly standard resoltion of 1280×720, giving it 267 PPI - that shouldn't cause any problems.

This issue has been reported to the Chromium team.

Slideshare seem to have screwed up some of the formatting, but here are the slides.

Full details of the day on Lanyrd.

Thanks to Nick and the rest of the team for inviting me. It was an excellent day full of demos, discussions, and debates.

public class clickWidget extends AppWidgetProvider
{
@Override
public void onUpdate( Context context, AppWidgetManager appWidgetManager, int[] appWidgetIds )
{
RemoteViews remoteViews =
   new RemoteViews( context.getPackageName(), R.layout.widget );
remoteViews.setImageViewResource(R.id.ImageView01, drawableResourse);

ComponentName myWidget =
   new ComponentName( context, clickWidget.class );

// Create an Intent to launch Browser
Intent intent =
   new Intent(
      Intent.ACTION_VIEW, Uri.parse("http://example.com")
   );
PendingIntent pendingIntent =
   PendingIntent.getActivity(context, 0, intent, 0);

remoteViews.setOnClickPendingIntent(R.id.ImageView01, pendingIntent);
appWidgetManager.updateAppWidget( myWidget, remoteViews);
}

I've used this as the basis of a demo widget - "MI5 Terror Threat Level". The widget displays the UK's Threat Level on your homescreen. Clicking on it takes you to the MI5 page discussing the threat level.

The threat level is determined by parsing the RSS that the security services so helpfully provide. At the moment, the widget keeps a local copy of the graphics because the RSS feed contains references to "localhost" images.

You can download the widget by scanning in this QR code.

MI5 Widget - QR Code

Yesterday morning I asked the Number 10 Downing Street web team if they could provide their statistics. I figured that the PM's website gets enough readers from a wide selection of the web community to give a fairly impartial measure of the popular web browsers.

Here's their (very quick) reply

Terence Eden is on Mastodon

@edent

Replying to @10DowningStreet@downingstreet can you tell us how many Firefox/IE/Safari users visit the Number 10 website? Would be really helpful to UK web developers

---

UK Prime Minister

@10DowningStreet

Replying to @edent@edent Top are: IE7 22%, IE8 20%, IE6 12%, Firefox3.5.3 9%, FF3.5.2 7%, FF3.0.14 5%, FF3.0.13 4%, Safari 4.0.3 4%, Chrome 2.0.172.43 2%

---

Or, to express it graphically...

Chart Showing Browser Stats

Firefox overall accounts for 25% - a fairly strong showing. But with IE6 stubbornly stuck at 12%, it will be a while before we can consign it to the dustbin of web history. Opera is languishing in the 15% marked as "Other" along with my browser of choice, Lynx.

The regular BlackBerry browser is... how can I put this politely... sub-optimal. For reading mobile-friendly sites it's perfectly adequate - but for anything more complex it tends to choke.

Don't get me wrong, it's "good enough" for most basic browsing needs, but a lack of tabs, half-arsed JavaScript implementation and idiosyncratic rendering choices make for a somewhat frustrating browsing experience.

Enter Opera Mini 5 (beta).  Opera has been knocking around for ages. Their desktop browser is solid and their mobile browser has always been rated highly. But how does it compare to the BlackBerry's native browser? Let's find out!

The Good

Opera Mini 5 beta

From the first launch you can tell that a lot of care an attention has gone in to Opera Mini. The startup screen has visual bookmarks - AKA speed-dials.

Start Page

There's an impressive amount of animation - similar to App World - and the user interface is fairly snappy.

The new menu bar gives quick access to all the functions Opera has to offer.

New Menu Bar

Extended Menu Bar

Pages start in "Zoomed Out" mode so you can get an overview of the page.

BBC News - Zoomed Out

A click of the track ball zooms in. Here you can see how well the text and images are rendered.

Zoomed In

Tabbed Browsing

Opera Mini handles tabs wonderfully. Because Opera sets itself as the default browser - any link you click on in an email is opened in a new tab in Opera.

Lots of tabs

Closing Tabs

Text Selection

The native browser is very good at text selection - so is Opera.

Text Selection

Text Selection Instructions

Highlighted Text

Copy and Search

The Bad

Missing Letters

As you can see, there is a missing letter on this page.

Spot The Missing Letters

This happens across websites with no seeming pattern other than the last letter on a line.

No YouTube

The native BlackBerry browser passes YouTube links to the media player.

YouTube? What's That?

Opera doesn't do anything with the links. I didn't expect it to have a fully-fledge flash player - but the least it could do is pass streaming media to the in built application that will handle it.

Poor Text Entry

The text boxes look nice, but have serious flaws.

Poor Text Entry

They don't respect the normal BlackBery conventions. There's no auto-correction, holding down a letter doesn't capitalise it. Sometimes hitting delete removes all the text. This is infuriating.

Miscellaneous

There are a collection of things which prevent me loving Opera Mini 5 (Beta).

• Lack of standard BlackBerry keyboard shortcuts.  I can't press K for Bookmarks, P for Page Address, nor T to jump to the Top of the page.
• Inability to send links.  If I'm reading an interesting page on the BlackBerry browser, I can send it via email or SMS - no way to do that with Opera.
• Can't open links in a new tab. I know it's a bit churlish to complain when tabs are a new feature.
• Clicking "Back" returns you to the top of the previous page - not your last position on the previous page.

Conclusion

There are some annoying faults in Opera Mini 5 (beta) - but the clue is in the name - it's a beta.  The browsing experience is so good, I can gloss over the missing letters and the poor text entry.

The fast rendering and tabbed browsing are enough to keep me using it for now.   Looks like RIM purchased Torch Mobile just in time!