Blazer tricks and tips

Posted on March 27, 2008 in Palm and Software. - No comments

Palm’s Blazer is far from everything you’d hope a web browser would be and it looks extremely unlikely that the situation is going to get any better any time soon. There are, however, a number of tricks and tips that can improve your user-experience.

Much of the information contained in this article came from and excellent Blazer Tricks and Tips thread started by wozofoz on the Brighthand Palm TX Forum.

This article is based on the usage Blazer v4.3 installed on a Palm TX. No promises can be made that the advice given below should be applicable on other version and platforms.

• Start Blazer with a blank page
• Optimized mode
• Fast mode
• Disable Javascript
• Adding website to the Favourites application
• Google
• Compressing web pages
• Blazer Maintenance
• Offline content
• Blazer freezes when accessing a website

Start Blazer with a blank page

There’s no reason to wait while your Palm initiates the wi-fi connection, loads and displays the homepage every time you start Blazer. If you don’t actually need or want the homepage this is just a waste of time.

• From the “Options“ menu select “Preferences
• On the “Page“ tab use the “Start With“ drop-down to select “Blank Page

If you wish to go to your homepage at any point, just click on the Home icon.

You can also choose to start with the Book marks being deplayed. This also prevents Blazer from initiating the wifi-connection until you select the page you wish to go to and provides a handy jumping off point.

h2(#optimized0. Optimized Mode

Optimised mode with try and adapt web pages so that they fit nicely onto the screen. so that there is as little scrolling from side to side needed. Sometimes it’s better to use the TX in landscape mode with the input area hidden to give Blazer a little more horizontal space to play with.

• From Blazer, from the “Options Menu“ select “Optimised Mode“

Sometimes, especially when a site uses complex layouts, it’ll be necessary to use ‘Wide Page Mode’ to view a web page properly.

• From Blazer, from the “Options Menu“ select “Wide Page Mode“

Fast Mode

Tapping on the lightening bold in Blazer’s top bar gives you the option of selecting “Fast mode“ or “Normal mode“ while browsing the internet. You can use “Fast Mode” to turn off various functionality in order to download pages quickly and prevent styles that may break the display of the website on a pda from being used.

To control the features enabled/disabled in “Fast mode”

• From the “Options“ menu, select “Preferences“
• Select the “General“ tab (Additional options will appear)
• Un-tick “Disable Cascading style sheets“ and “Don’t download images!“ if necessary.
• Select the “OK button.

When you Tap on the Lightning Bolt icon on the top bar of Blazer and select Fast Mode webpages will load very fast but you get no images. This can be handy to just read text and you can simply change to Normal Mode while in the web page to see the images.

Disable Javascript

The last thing I want to do is use my valuable screen space to display ads, especially when they obscure vital parts of the web page.

Disabling Javascript has a number of benefits – it prevents many of these adverts from appearing reducing the on-screen clutter and also improves the performance of the page as the advert images aren’t downloaded and the Javascript itself doesn’t have to be processed. The downside is that some ofthe useful Javascript page functionality is lost. However, if you are just browsing web-pages I’ve not found this to be a significant problem.

Here’s an example of Digital Spy with and without Javascript enabled¹:

And here’s what the page looks like if we disable Javascript:

To disable Javascript

• Launch Blazer (if it’s not already running!)
• From the Menu select “Options“
• Select “Preferences“
• Select the “General“ tab
• Tick “Disable Javascript” in your current profile (Normal or Fast Mode – You may want to have it disabled in Fast Mode, but leave Javascript enabled in Normal mode.)

Adding website to the Favourites application

Everyone should know that you can bookmark web pages within Blazer, but fewer people know that it’s possible to put shortcuts to web pages in the Favourites application. The shortcut doesn’t need to be a page that you’ve already bookmarked.

• Launch the Favorites application
• Select a blank slot or an entry you’re happy to replace
• From the Menu select “Edit Favorite“ (You can activate this quickly by holding the stylus on the entry until the “Edit Favorite” dialogue is displayed.
• On the Type dropdown, select “Web Link”
• Enter the URL & give the entry a name.

Google

Google provides a pda/mobile version of it’s search which can be accessed at the following URL:

http://www.google.com/pda

Using Google is often the quickest way to get to your destination website – you can often avoid having to enter long and complicated URLs.

If when when you enter the search phrase you add the words “pda” and “mobile” you’ll often get a direct address to a pda or mobile optimised version of the site that you’re looking for.

Fo example: “wikipedia pda mobile”

Google Format Webpages

If you use the mobile version of Google, you can get Google to automatically adapt the content to suite mobile/pda devices. It uses the Google transcoder to do this (See the next section below).

• Go to www.google.com/m
• Select the “Mobile” link at the bottom of the page (if required)
• Select the “Settings“’ link
• Scroll down until you get to “Format webpages for your phone” and select the “On“ radio button.
• Select “Save”.

Now, when you search using Google “Mobile” you should find that all the links you follow will be formatted for mobile/pda.

If this doesn’t seem to be working and when you check yout setting you find that “Format webpages for your phone” keeps changing back to “Off” you can try the following:

• Select tje “Classic” link near the bottom of the page.
• Select the “Preferences“ link
• Tap on the “Save Preferences“ button (you don’t have to change anything)
• Now select the “Mobile“ link at the bottom of the page and you should now find that your setting stick.

Compressing web pages

A number of services, called “Mobile Transcoders” will convert web content by reformatting and compressing it for delivery to mobile devices. Obviously you need to consider you privacy when using these services, but when it comes to trying to read horribly formatted websites these services can make a remarkable difference. A selection of such services follow. If you can recommend others, please let me know.

In many cases if you find that you can’t load a page because it is too big or has too many images you can solve the problem by simply clearing out Blazer’s cache.

Skweezer

According to the Skweezer website “Skweezer is a free service that optimizes Web pages, searches, and e-mail for use on PDAs and cell phones. Mobile Internet users access Skweezer by visiting www.skweezer.net, then use the portal as a “wireless gateway” to browse and search the Web. Skweezer compresses and reformats content being downloaded, so that it loads faster, looks better, and is easier to navigate. Skweezer includes an RSS reader, site directory, and other useful features designed specifically for the mobile environment.”

To quickly view a large web page then enter the following url in the address bar (and remember you can make a shortcut if you use it often):

http://skweezer.net/s.aspx?url={site url}

For example:

http://www.skweezer.net/s.aspx?url=digitalspy.co.uk

MobileLeap

MobileLeap currently provide a free (at the moment) demo of thie “v2 Mobile Virtual Browser”. Their website says that the Virtual Browser will detect your device type, and instantly reformat websites by compressing data, filtering out unsupported content and fitting the pages to your screen.

To enter URLs via the address bar in Blazer use the following URL:

http://mlvb.net/{site url}

Mowser

According to the Mowser website “Mowser mobilizes the web by taking HTML pages normally viewed on a PC and adapts them so they work on a mobile phone. During this translation process, Mowser converts the page in a predictable, linear manner. In order to ensure that the highest quality and most useful web page is displayed on your mobile phone or device, Mowser may alter images, text formatting and/or certain aspects of web page functionality, or forward to a publisher’s mobile version instead. “

To enter URLs via the address bar in Blazer use the following URL:

http://mowser.com/web/{site url}

Google Wireless Transcoder

Google have their own page transcoder that they use with their mobile search. You don’t have to go via their mobile search to use it, just use the following URL in Blazer’s address bar:

http://google.com/gwt/n?u={http://site url}

Blazer maintenance

It’s well known that Blazer can get a touch temperamental from time to time. One of the most common problems is Blazer taking a long time to start. This tends to hapen when the cookie database gets corrupted and can be solved by deleting the cookie database as described below.

Various strategies have been adopted to keep the browser behaving smoothly but most involve the deletion of the various temporary files that Blazer creates during use such as cache files, history and cookies.

You can tidy up these files using the menu options within Blazer or using a file manager such as FileZ. If you’re not confident using a file manager or have any worried that you might delete the wrong files then stick to the other ways of clearing Blazer’s data files.

In the following procedures we don’t use Blazer to clear the cookies database, but delete the entire database itself. This forces Blazer to re-create it from scratch.

Deleting the cookies database

Warning: By deleting the cookies database you will lose all stored cookies. This will affect any “remember my log-on” and other saved web page settings. Make sure you know what your passwords are!

• Press the Home button to launch Applications (Palm Launcher)
• From the “App“ menu select “Delete“
• Select the file “Blazer Cookies“ and click on the “Delete“ button
• Confirm the deletion by selecting the “Yes“ button.

The next time Blazer is launched it will create a new “Blazer Cookies” database file.

Clearing History

• Launch Blazer and Tap the “World icon“ on the Top Bar.
• Select the “History“ button
• Select the “Clear All“ button
• Select the “Cancel“ button.

Clearing the cache

• From the “Options“ menu, select “Preferences“.
• Select the “Advanced“ tab.
• Tap the “Clear Cache“ button.

If you tick the “Clear cache on exit“ button this will be done automatically for you every time you quit Blazer.

Clearing Blazer files using a file manager

The steps below describe how to delete Blazer’s temporary files using FileZ, but it should be possible to do the same in any good file manager.

Warning: You will lose all stored cookies. and need to log in again at all sites.

• Launch FileZ
• Select “view and Edit Files“
• Tap “Internal“ to reveal the file list
• Scroll down the list until you can see the following files:
  • Blazer BF-History
  • Blazer CacheHistory
  • Blazer Cookies
  • Blazer Field Autofill
  • Blazer Find Autofill
  • Blazer URL Autofill
• Select these files by tapping on their name. A tick will appear on the left. If you’ve selected the wrong files just tap on the filename again. Take care not to select “Blazer Bookmarks” as you will delete your bookmarks!
• Once you’re happy that you have the correct files selected, select “Delete“ from the “Item“ menu.

The next time Blazer is started the files will be recreated.

BlazerDA

There is a Blazer DA (Desktop Assistant) that will delete all cookies, history, and autofill from Blazer web browser. Just launch with your favorite DA launcher, and select the objects to delete. It’s available here

Offline content

1. You can copy web pages to your SD card (using a reader) and view entering file://card_name/filename.htm in the address bar.

Local Files can be bookmarked like regular Webpages, so you can easily access them (I do this with some handy local Websites I’ve made).

Blazer has a finite number of bookmarks (100), but why not just export your bookmarks from your desktop web browser and copy the bookmarks html file to your memory card?

From Firefox:

• From the “Bookmarks“ menu select “Organise Bookmarks…“ The Bookarks Manager should now appear
• From the “File“ menu, select “*Export”
• Save the “Bookmarks.html” file onto your memory card.

From Internet Explorer 7:

• From the “Files“ menu, select “Import and Export…”
• Click the “Next“ button
• Select “Export Favorites“ and click the “Next“ button
• Click the “Next“ button (or select the particular part of your favourites you want to export first)
• Click on the “Browse“ button to select the location and filename for your exported favorites
• Click the “Next“ button
• Click the “Finished“ button

If you’ve copied the file into the root (the top level directory) on your memory card, all you need to do now is put the card back into the TX and point Blazer to:

file://{card name}/bookmarks.html

You may have chosen a different filename (IE defaults to bookmark.htm.)

Once you’ve got your bookmarks displayed in Blazer you can add this page to your Blazer Bookmarks!

Blazer freezes when accessing a website

If you find that Blazer seems to have frozen while trying to access a particular website you can try tapping on the little arrow head to the left of the address bar. This should bring up a list of recently visited websites, although you may have to wait up to 30 seconds for it to appear. If the list appears, select another website and with luck you should find Blazer responding again.

¹ Of course I could always try the mobile version of the site: http://mobile.digitalspy.co.uk.

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