Overview

Why it's created

As the CPU power is getting stronger, and screen refresh speed keeps improving for E-Ink devices, more and more people start to use E-Ink devices to browse the internet. It’s working; however the experience is not good enough. Existing browsers are not designed for E-Ink devices. So many UI elements are designed for normal Android devices: fancy animations, dimming background when dialogs pop up, etc. To make a browser suitable for E-Ink devices, two principles should be followed while designing UI interactions:

Fewer repaint counts Make repaint area as small as possible So far, I haven’t seen a dedicated browser for E-Ink devices yet. I decided to make one, based on a Github project written by Gaukler Faun. FOSS Browser is a lightweight browser that supports many features, including ad blocking, tab control, gesture control, etc. I took some time to refactor the codes and make necessary modifications to make it more appealing for E-Ink devices. Now it has a lot of useful features for E Ink devices.

Main features

Now it has following E-ink related features:

• PageUp/pageDown by (touch area / volume keys / onscreen buttons)

• Reader mode (remove headers, ads, sidebars, footers, for easier reading)

• Full text translation mode

• Vertical reading mode (suitable for Chinese and Japanese)

• Content display customization (bold font, font size change, font style change)

• Export web content as epub file

• Tool bar configuration (show/hide actions, or re-arrange order)

• Desktop mode feature

• All icons in high contrast colors

• Refactor most popup dialogs, so that there’s no longer animations.

• Remove gray mask when dialog pops up.