[Giveaway] Intex Aqua Fish (ended)
 

I have an Aqua Fish, the screen is snapped in half so the touch accuracy can be dodgy, but other than that everything works. As it has been replaced I was wondering if anyone wanted it to use for development/testing?

Please post your plans for it here and I'll chose a recipient at the weekend. Preference to UK residence as shipping will be cheaper but willing to send further if it would be better for the community.

Re: [Giveaway] Intex Aqua Fish
 

I candidate myself :) I am not in the UK but at the moment on the other side, in the Netherlands.
I am not a developer yet but I would like to start contributing somehow. I am learning python and Qt in this period. Currently I am using a Nexus 5, but it does not have official support.

P.s.: if there is a real developer who needs it, he/she has the priority. I agree

Re: [Giveaway] Intex Aqua Fish
 

Surprised there's so little interest... I'll leave it another 12 hours.

Re: [Giveaway] Intex Aqua Fish
 

Hey S_O :D

I’m surprised too :confused:

So I might as well take a shot at it ;)

I’d been hesitant to post in this thread as I’m not sure I’d meet your criteria?

First a little info:
I was close to buy @ancelads jolla 1, though bailed out as I was certain I would go for a Xperia x straight away. I’ve had second thoughts on that project as there are to many uncertainties regarding apps. If all my everyday apps would run on sailfish.

So here I am wanting to test out sailfish and your device would be very welcome to do just that.
Even more I could contribute to the community by testing and reporting my findings on apps/scripts/hacks etc., might even consider taking request on testing apps/scripts/hacks (apps would mostly be android, do they install, how do they run etc. ). I think this could help others to jump on the sailfish adventure, to do a list of working apps/scripts/hacks etc.
If I found sailfish to suit my needs I would give the phone back to the community (when I’ve bought an Xperia X/XA2) and if it doesn’t meet my needs it would go back to the community as well :D

Regards Dousan.

Re: [Giveaway] Intex Aqua Fish
 

I'm thinking of sending the phone to Dousan to have a play with on the condition he sends it on to claustn in a couple of weeks - does this sound like a good idea?

Re: [Giveaway] Intex Aqua Fish
 

Toot Toot sounds good to me @S_O, I’m looking forward to giving it a spin :D

Re: [Giveaway] Intex Aqua Fish
 

Fine for me as well :)

Re: [Giveaway] Intex Aqua Fish
 

OK, it will be in the post today :)

Re: [Giveaway] Intex Aqua Fish
 

Awesome news :-)

Your gesture is much appreciated, thanks for the opportunity suicidal_orange :D

Regards Dousan.

Re: [Giveaway] Intex Aqua Fish (ended)
 

Picked up the intex from the post office Wednesday after work, though didn't have time to turn it on until today.
Have just briefly played around with it and updated to latest firmware.
So far I'm pretty impressed with the OS and even the phones performance :D

Re: [Giveaway] Intex Aqua Fish (ended)
 

Hey S_O.
First of all, big thanks for the opportunity to test sailfish, it's much appreciated :D
The verdict, in short, is that the OS is a no go for me. There are to many uncertainties, mostly regarding the support for android apps. Will an update break the ussage of a given app?
Then there's the whole camera and bluetooth issues on the xperia x.
A daily issue with sailfish was the browser, damn that is just utterly time robbing, seriously bad and slow, not even firefox would do the job for me. Simple everyday tasks just got annoying to do.
Though i really like the idea behind and the overall feel Sailfish has.
The thing for me is i'm not in the same place anymore, i just want things to work without any fiddling, it just dont give me any pleasure what so ever anymore, rather the opposite.
I really tried to like the OS as my greatest experiences with mobile 'hacking' was with N900 and N9, though those times are just in the past.
The thing is every tine i see a N900 or a N9 for sale some part in me wants ti buy it even though i know i have absolutely no use of it other than sentimental use lol. Still best ride ever with a smartphone :D

Regards Dousan.

Re: [Giveaway] Intex Aqua Fish (ended)
 

If you're main use on Sailfish are Android apps...then just pick an Android phone :) I agree on the browser, which sometimes is quite bad.
Anyway, whenever you want I will be happy to try that phone too ;)

Re: [Giveaway] Intex Aqua Fish (ended)
 

It's not android apps per se, it's just apps that run on either android or iOS and i have an iPhone 6 that runs just fine. I just wanted some more freedom and didn't want to go full android. I was looking for the Meego experience with android support ;)

Just pm me an address :D

Re: [Giveaway] Intex Aqua Fish (ended)
 

I must admit statements like that really puzzle me. Every time I read something like that, I keep asking myself, what on earth can these people possibly be trying to do that the Sailfish browser cannot do? I have never had any major issue. Small niggles, definitely. Like for example the infamous disco lights on loading a page with "too many" (read, "more than three") pictures, but that has been fixed as far as I can tell. My only remaining issue is that a text selection does not work in browser edit boxes. I still cannot understand why. It works everywhere else.

Re: [Giveaway] Intex Aqua Fish (ended)
 

It’s not so much it can’t do it, it’s more the speed and at times it doesn’t fully load the page or it takes minutes to do so.

If I should paint a picture it would be like racing a Fiat 127 in a F1 race. It would be able to get around the course though at a ridiculous pace compared to a F1 car lol.

Re: [Giveaway] Intex Aqua Fish (ended)
 

Minutes? Any Examples?

Re: [Giveaway] Intex Aqua Fish (ended)
 

Didn’t time it with a stopwatch, just an estimate.

Don’t see the point in giving examples, though thanks if your intention was to help me get a better experience with the sailfish browser :D

Re: [Giveaway] Intex Aqua Fish (ended)
 

Well, it works on my machine™.

Re: [Giveaway] Intex Aqua Fish (ended)
 

Just my 2 cents - web changes way too much too often for ancient version of Gecko to cut it. Browser itself is great, but there is really no point in denying that its underlying engine needs some love, no point in blaming users for various speed and compatibility issues. If it "works for you", then great. I don't know how you do it, for me even stupid gmail can't render itself properly.

Re: [Giveaway] Intex Aqua Fish (ended)
 

I am not convinced it is Gecko. It could be just the hardware. My Jolla 1 is faster at loading the websites that I frequent faster than my daughter's Android tablet, but I it is just a dual-core, 1GB, 8 years old thing. I am happy to believe that a recent deca-core, 8GB super-duper mega device will come out more favourably compared to Jolla.

Re: [Giveaway] Intex Aqua Fish (ended)
 

Just go to TJC and take a quick glance at the first page. At this very moment, I see 3 posts regarding Sailfish Browser:
https://i.imgur.com/vVum8lv.png

Sure, one of these is an aggregate thread for all the issues, but there is something about "website gazzetta.it on default browser kills Xperia X" and "Complete freeze after FB App and Sailfish -Browser combination" that kinda makes me think that it doesn't actually work that great.

Anyway, as a true "Power User of The Internet" (thanks Zuck) I decided to run some tests, you could probably repeat that too if you somehow consider my numbers to be faked or whatever.

On PC, I'm comparing recent version of Opera (52) and Firefox 38.0.5. I didn't run JetStream on PC since I wasted waaaay to much time on remaining tests to even want to try that.

I'm comparing Edge on Lumia 650 and Firefox 38 (aka Sailfish Browser) on AquaFish. Both phones have the same SoC. I also run it on Firefox 59 through AlienDalvik (I expect overhead from the VM to yield some shitty results).

JetStream:
https://i.imgur.com/MgyUJbF.png - Edge 15 on Lumia 650 (12.861 +/- 0.61225)
https://i.imgur.com/belOD76.png - Sailfish Browser on AquaFish (12.784 +/- 0.56748)
https://i.imgur.com/qmqDY99.png - Firefox 59 on AquaFish (13.284 +/- 2.0083)

Web 3.0 Basemark on PC (Surface Pro 4, Core i5-6300U):
https://web.basemark.com/result/?4KHkpQo5 - Firefox 38 (41.71)
https://web.basemark.com/result/?4KHj27gv - Opera 52 (242.98)

Web 3.0 Basemark on phones
https://web.basemark.com/result/?4KHl0Fa1 - Edge 15 on Lumia 650 (25.58)
https://web.basemark.com/result/?QpNIlIz - Sailfish Browser on AquaFish (22.05)
Unfortunately Firefox 59 on AquaFish crashed

Key takeaways from these tests:
- despite offering a better web browsing experience (Web 3.0 test), Lumia 650 is absolute **** at running asm.js code. These results are just sad :(
- overhead from AlienDalvik didn't stop Firefox 59 from trashing the competition
- I wasted way too much life on proving people wrong on the Interwebz

Now, can we all stop pretending that SFOS Browser has no issues with either performance or website compatibility, please?

Re: [Giveaway] Intex Aqua Fish (ended)
 

What do those numbers signify? Are higher numbers better than lower ones?

No one is saying there are no issues with the browser (there most definitely are, the lack of any sort of text selection in text fields is one of the most striking problems as pichlo already mentioned, as well as the problem with crashing the entire device through certain websites which is clearly documented), just that for our purposes, it works just fine and is pretty fast.

I think what pichlo and I are also implicitly trying to say is that most of these problematic websites are those that load dozens of megabytes of images on their front page, along with dozens of massive third party scripts, multiple complete font sets, and so on. The main thing browser developers have to do is not to make their browser faster, but to constantly work around non-standard to completely broken websites. If everyone just chose to stick to the standards and hire competent people for the job, or in the case of companies like Google, stick to the standards they themselves helped create instead of making their websites work only in their own browser, there wouldn't be anywhere near as many problems, and the internet would be much faster.

Of course, a broken website shouldn't make a browser crash, and certainly not the entire system, but I'd take a guess and say 99% of performance problems are to blame on incompetent website developers rather than any real issues with the browsers.

To go off on a tangent, ever since Firefox updated their browser engine to 'Quantum', I've had nothing but trouble with its performance - and now it does the same thing as all the Webkit browsers in that if you scroll too quickly, the page just goes blank for a bit until that piece is loaded. Not looking forward to whenever that 'improvement' lands in the Sailfish browser.

Re: [Giveaway] Intex Aqua Fish (ended)
 

This has turned all technical o.O

Regardless of poor webpage development, loads of pics or 3. party scripts and whatnot, the sailfish browser is performing poorly. I have no such issues with safari on my iPhone 6.

But the point was it didn’t work for me and my usage of the web.

Re: [Giveaway] Intex Aqua Fish (ended)
 

In addition to nthn's summary (I would also like to know WTF the numbers represent ;)), here is one piece of evidence that I care about:

All the imgur links...

• On my Jolla 1 - resolve nicely to a picture of some sort with a lot of numbers
• On my Android tablet - resolve to a black rectangular placeholder, nothing more

All the basemark links...

• Jola 1 - a page with some text, numbers, buttons
• Android tablet - page fails to load ("Couldn't establish secure connection ")

In all cases, the default browser was used. It looks like a 2:0 win for the Sailfish browser to me :p

I would have attached a screenshot to demonstrate if only I knew how to take a screenshot on the damn Android tablet.

EDIT
OK, screenshots added. Had to take them with a camera, the only one I had available (which just happened to be Jolla). The bright dots are reflections of the ceiling lights.

Re: [Giveaway] Intex Aqua Fish (ended)
 

8 year old tablet is not a fair competition, is it? I can dig out my old Windows 98 machine and try loading some websites on Internet Explorer 6. This wouldn't tell me anything else than - well, IE6 sucks.

JetStream benchmarks evaluates how well/quickly the browser performs doing certain tasks, like crypto, loading external libraries, 3D rendering, physics, basic algorithms like Fibonacci numbers. More is better. In-depth analysis of each step, including source codes for the programs that were ran during benchmark here: https://browserbench.org/JetStream/in-depth.html
I know it's a bit specific and doesn't necessarily reflect how you'd use it in real life but it serves as a nice indication of how well JS engine of given browser performs doing various tasks.

That's why I also ran Web 3.0 Basemark, which evaluates WebGL, Canvas, SVG performance, as well as HTML5 support. Again, higher is better.

Too bad, it's already there, the difference is that if you then rapidly scroll up, SFOS browser shows some blurry mess from cache. I have no such issue on my PC though, but then I use one of these webkit browsers :/

Web has changed since 1980s, guys. You might not like these shiny, constantly refreshing, responsive websites, but they're here. According to StatCounter data this release of Firefox is in use by ~3% Firefox users, you can't expect web developers to jump through hoops just to support it, you know. Not being supported by an ancient browser doesn't mean that website is not coded according to standards, it just means that the browser is not supporting them.

Re: [Giveaway] Intex Aqua Fish (ended)
 

Of course not! (I was wrong, BTW, it's only 7 years old.)

Neither is comparing Jolla 1 (or, worse, Aqua Fish) with iPhone 6. Not only is the latter one year more recent, but, crucially, it was the top of the range at the time compared to Jolla which was a mediocre spec even at the time of release.

Which was exactly my point.

Anyway, to each his own. If Sailfish does not cut it for you, fair enough, do not use it.

Re: [Giveaway] Intex Aqua Fish (ended)
 

You're taking the same position of the apologist that's always used in these discussions, which presents both the present and the future as inevitable.

- Standards? Who cares! We know better than to do things in a way that's guaranteed to work! Stop complaining, this is the future!

- Keeping memory usage as low as possible? Who cares! Memory is cheap now, it's only normal for a plaintext chat application to take up 500MB of RAM! Stop complaining, this is the future!

- Cooperation? Who cares! We know better! Stop complaining, this is the future!

- Privacy? Who cares! Companies/governments already know everything about you by now! Stop complaining, this is the future!

It's always the same: if you have any complaints about current goings-on (and future directions) in the technology department, you must be a crazy senile caveman who doesn't want to follow the path of progress, the path of or towards enlightenment. No! We complain precisely because we see that this is not the path of progress. Change will always be fundamentally necessary, but the changes must also be good!

Either way, you're misrepresenting the issue. Save for the occasional actually new technology (a rare occurrence), web developers who want to support older browsers don't need to 'jump through hoops', they just need to adhere to the standards - then they support all browsers (except Internet Explorer, which is genuinely a browser many web developers still jump through hoops for).

Re: [Giveaway] Intex Aqua Fish (ended)
 

I don't know how suddenly cool things like CSS Grid, Fetch, WebRTC, Service Workers, Web Assembly or WebGL threaten your privacy nor directly lead to badly managing memory, but ok. It's not like anyone cooperated on these features. I know there are polyfills for some of the things I mentioned, some of which have their own weird bugs (CSS grid polyfill). Guess I should just code websites using tables then, since this is kinda guaranteed to work.

I'd like to remind that I use SFOS Browser as my daily driver and I'm concerned about my privacy and I hate that people make **** apps too (Faaceboook). But what I hate more is how toxic these communities, formed around free software, can get.

Re: [Giveaway] Intex Aqua Fish (ended)
 

You are misinterpreting again. All nthn's examples were examples of other things that are prevalent nowadays, in addition to bad web design.

All could be summarized with simple, "take as much as you can".
As opposed to, "take as little as you have to".

If you are under 35, then you may consider it normal and not even realize it is going on. You need to allocate a memory block for some operation? Old skool geezers like me would calculate exactly how many bytes are needed and allocate exactly that. The current approach is, allocate at least a megabyte, just in case. Memory is cheap, nobody cares. In my previous job, we ran into a bandwidth problem. My preferred approach would be, profile the system, find bottlenecks, optimize. The (much younger) tech lead opted for allocating more resources. I could give millions of other examples.

Re: [Giveaway] Intex Aqua Fish (ended)
 

What if the newer version of the browser engine had some optimizations and fixes? (probably has) What if new APIs not only let you do things you couldn't before, but saved both your time as a developer, and maybe even valuable resources? You can't just dismiss anything that's new because you just assume nobody cares about writing good code anymore.

I don't think it's about being younger or older, it's about being a good coder or a bad coder.

Re: [Giveaway] Intex Aqua Fish (ended)
 

Oh, of course there will be improvements in the newer versions. Again, we don't dismiss 'anything that's new', we dismiss 'that which is new but worse'. I'm only annoyed by the carefree/careless attitude that dominates the field of technology, which causes the problem that everyone constantly has to clean up after each other and catch up with each other.

I also can't really think of any examples where both time and resources are saved (well, save for throwing bureaucracy out the window). It did remind me of the marvellous KolibriOS. I just found out it even runs Doom!

Re: [Giveaway] Intex Aqua Fish (ended)
 

I don't understand why it is so difficult to get across. I thought it was obvious but apparently not. Unless some people are being obtuse on purpose. Or indoctrinated.

Re: [Giveaway] Intex Aqua Fish (ended)
 

I no longer know what we're talking about, but you guys definitely sounded like you wanted to stick to 3 years old Firefox and you were against "new web standards". I don't know if you have actually done any modern web development, maybe you're just judging the whole tech by some badly coded, high-profile apps (Facebook? :D) as most of my friends do.

I am too. But I also think that change is sometimes needed and welcome - especially for CSS which is a goddamn mess. I still haven't tried any of the trendy JS frameworks nor NodeJS cause this is a wild west.

Re: [Giveaway] Intex Aqua Fish (ended)
 

Nothing wrong with nodejs, it's fully a server-side technique so you get to pretty much decide what gets rendered on the browser :)

Re: [Giveaway] Intex Aqua Fish (ended)
 

Remember left-pad? :D

Re: [Giveaway] Intex Aqua Fish (ended)
 

ahhahhaa :)
Yes of course, npm is both curse and blessing!

Re: [Giveaway] Intex Aqua Fish (ended)
 

It has now reached @claustn and it's new life :D