Terence Eden’s Blog<p><strong>BMW i3's Web Browser</strong></p><p><a href="https://shkspr.mobi/blog/2015/06/bmw-i3s-web-browser/" rel="nofollow noopener" translate="no" target="_blank"><span class="invisible">https://</span><span class="ellipsis">shkspr.mobi/blog/2015/06/bmw-i</span><span class="invisible">3s-web-browser/</span></a></p><p></p><p>I'm currently test-driving a BMW's all-electric i3 REX. One of the options the demonstrator model has is a web browser! Yes, for just £95 per year, you can get a slow and painful browsing experience IN YOUR CAR! (Only to be used when fully stopped - or in autonomous drive mode.)</p><p>Here's a quick run-down of its features.</p><p><strong>HTML5</strong></p><p>A fairly miserable score of <a href="https://web.archive.org/web/20200924220757/http://html5test.com/s/de1eb1283ebe8de4.html" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">268 out of 555 points</a> on <a href="http://html5test.com/" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">http://html5test.com/</a>The screen is 1280*480 with good visibility. It's slow to scroll and, even with the touchpad controller, a pain to navigate.</p><p><strong>User Agent</strong></p><p>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.</p><p><strong>Security</strong></p><p>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.</p><p><strong>Options</strong></p><p>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 <a href="http://hpr.dogphilosophy.net/test/" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">HTML5 sound test page</a>. MP3 is supported. Impressively, so are Ogg and WebM!</p><p><strong>Video</strong></p><p>Some HTML5 video is supported - although playback is a bit jerky. Audio support is variable.</p><p>So, let's try out YouTube - the biggest video site on the planet!</p><p></p><p>Well, that's underwhelming. I wonder what is up with the Flash player on this thing.</p><p>A quick (slow) visit to Adobe shows us part of the problem -</p><p></p><p>An <em>ancient</em> Flash version. Which means you can expect to see a lot of things like:</p><p></p><p><strong>Tabs</strong></p><p>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.</p><p>Open too many tabs (3 in this case) and you get this somewhat confusing error message.</p><p>There's no obvious way to close a tab...</p><p>You can always go into your history to see what you were reading before the browser flamed out.</p><p><strong>Headers and Proxy</strong></p><p>A fairly sparse set of headers are sent by the UA.</p><p>The proxy is by <a href="http://www.mwaysolutions.com/en/automotive/" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">M-Way Solutions</a>. I'm not sure if it's the proxy, or Vodafone, but there is some <em>severe</em> picture compression going on:</p><p></p><p><strong>Rendering</strong></p><p>For regular web pages, the rendering is competent - if slow. Here's my blog:</p><p></p><p>CSS rounded corner and webfonts all work.</p><p>But there is a glaring omission. The Unicode support from the browser is atrocious. Want to view Emoji? This is what you'll see -</p><p></p><p>☹</p><p><strong>Overall</strong></p><p>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 <em>probably</em> vulnerable to modern attacks.</p><p>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 <em>constantly</em>.</p><p>But, apart from that, the i3 is a great car!</p><p></p><p><a rel="nofollow noopener" class="hashtag u-tag u-category" href="https://shkspr.mobi/blog/tag/browser/" target="_blank">#browser</a> <a rel="nofollow noopener" class="hashtag u-tag u-category" href="https://shkspr.mobi/blog/tag/car/" target="_blank">#car</a> <a rel="nofollow noopener" class="hashtag u-tag u-category" href="https://shkspr.mobi/blog/tag/i3/" target="_blank">#i3</a> <a rel="nofollow noopener" class="hashtag u-tag u-category" href="https://shkspr.mobi/blog/tag/review/" target="_blank">#review</a></p>