Nokia talks about the N9 browser, shares some scores too

The N9 continues to top the worldwide charts for most interesting handset of the month and that’s the way Nokia made it. We waited for the first MeeGo device for nearly two years and now that it’s finally official we can’t keep off it. It’s made to blend in top notch design and innovative build quality with a “fresh out the oven” OS with Nokia’s knowhow of craftsmanship and technology all into one device. A powerful combo indeed.

Now the official Nokia blog – Conversations, is dedicating an article to the new browser of the N9, detailing how it works, how it feels, how it scores and what were the ideas behind it. Nokia-appointed “browser guru” Christian Sejersen shares that the N9′s Meego browser was designed with the idea not to annoy its users and keep out of the way while they are browsing. So the UI is quite minimalistic – much like on an Android powered smartphone.

Nokia N9 browser Top sites options and UI

It all starts with the Top sites screen, which saves your most visited webpages for quicker access at a later point.

Zooming in on pages is done by either double-tapping or pinch-zooming with two fingers. There’s also an option to enlarge text, which only affects the text and not the other stuff on the page. It’s a way to highlight what you’re reading and keep all distractions safely aside.

Nokia Conversations was also keen to brag about the Nokia N9 HTML5 support. The smartphone scored an impressive 283 points on the standard HTML5 compatibility test. For comparison, a standard Firefox desktop browser has about 270-280 on the same test and Nokia claims that it’s a very competitive results that will hardly be matched by any competitors. There’s also a quite long stats page for the test, featuring many other devices and OSes and indeed the Meego-representing N9 has the highest score, even topping the HTML5-capable iPhone 4 with iOS 4.3. The only mobile browser to beat the N9 is the iOS 5 Safari, which got 303 while still being in beta.

HTML5 test page scores: N9 and iPhone 4

Keep in mind that the N9 is a prototype pre-release device too and its results will likely improve as well.

Next Nokia listed the supported technologies by the Nokia N9 browser.

CSS 3
DOM Level 3
HTML over TCP/IP
HTML5
Javascript 1.8
Webkit 2 based
XHTML
XML

The N9 also doesn’t feature Flash support at this stage and it may very well end up without it on the shelves. This is so Apple but still has some logic by its side. Whether you like it or not, agree or not – Flash will probably be replaced at some point by HTML5. Still it would be more convenient to have Flash and be given the option to turn it off rather than to erase it from the equation all together.

Sadly Nokia doesn’t see MeeGo in its future plans and the N9 could very well fall victim to limited developer support (meaning no apps), software updates shortage and just general neglect.

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