[APP] Metro Browser [V] 1.7 - Updated 11/1/2011

[dkp1977]

Indeed :| I've noted the issues with VideoBB. It seems like they changed their logic and we can not get access now...

Ill have to look for a way around this

No hurry.. Rome wasn't build in a day. Most sites I frequent offer megavideo anyway.. Honestly, take your time.

 

[xflier]

I bought it, but I can't get it to work somehow except YouTube. Not even the tested website, icefilms. Do we have some tutorial show how to use it? Thanks for help!

Sent from my SGH-i917 using Board Express

 

[dkp1977]

I bought it, but I can't get it to work somehow except YouTube. Not even the tested website, icefilms. Do we have some tutorial show how to use it? Thanks for help!

Sent from my SGH-i917 using Board Express

Don't know about icefilms.org, but it's pretty much the same everywhere. You just go to the website that contains streamable videos (like www.megacvideo.com), choose a video and click the appropriate link. That's all about it.

 

[diboze]

hm i bought it today, here my results:

1. the product information contains some typos...

2. youtube wont show any videos,
opening videos on m.youtube.com shows http://rtsp/****** -> IE Error
videos on youtube.com crash the app

3. videozer/videobb show the normal windows phone media player, but say the connection isnt there...althought wifi works

4. megaupload and megaporn (tested it for educational purposes only, of course) only show empty boxes all over...

v1.1

over all i am not soo happy with this app, so i wont rate it, because the result would not be good

 

[Marvin_S]

hm i bought it today, here my results:

1. the product information contains some typos...

2. youtube wont show any videos,
opening videos on m.youtube.com shows http://rtsp/****** -> IE Error
videos on youtube.com crash the app

3. videozer/videobb show the normal windows phone media player, but say the connection isnt there...althought wifi works

4. megaupload and megaporn (tested it for educational purposes only, of course) only show empty boxes all over...

v1.1

over all i am not soo happy with this app, so i wont rate it, because the result would not be good

Thank you for your comment.

1) Thank you for noticing, it was rushed, ill correct it.

2) M.youtube.com works identical as on IE9, we did not touch that one. Go to desktop version of youtube, now you can watch the videos. Ill investigate the crash (damn WP7 so crash sensitive)

3) Since 2/3 days VideoBB/VideoZer changed their parsing logic (I already submitted an update of the description and removed VideoBB/Videozer from the list). We are working hard to find a fix for this new system, but their security seem to have been thigtened up severly... sorry for the inconvenience.

4) Megaupload/Megaporn don't work? Can you show me an example of what you are trying to play. I mean I'm trying to do the best job possible, but I can not cover/test all scenarios myself and there were no complains during beta testing. I might have overlooked something. I dont know what you mean by the squares. You should have a pure megavideo link, not embedded. Ill implement an autoscanning feature later.

I understand. I have already implemented tabs. But due to MS's odd policy I have to wait a couple of days before I can submit the update... bc I changed the description so they have to check the description before it can be published and in the meanwhile I can not submit an update...

Still there is a lot of work to do. But as all of you know, we are supporting something not natively supported and have to work with what we got.

But the tabs is implemented, so thats another feature completed... it will take some time to get it all working as expected.

EDIT:
Youtube crash is fixed. Dont know really why it occurs, but WP7 has some odd behaviour with certain task choosers.

 

[scoobysnacks]

This app does crazy stuuf like randomly closing, and it doesn't even work..

Boo urns

 

[neoxphuse]

Tried it, but it loads simple websites way too slow.

 

[scoobysnacks]

Sorry but I really hate this browser...

It makes me want to punch a baby

 

[minep]

Man, you will broke my phone!
I tried open MegaVideo, but first time app was crashed, second time - phone crashed. I don't tried it more.

LG Optimus E900 Mango official.

 

[diboze]

Thank you for your comment.

1) Thank you for noticing, it was rushed, ill correct it. ah ok, just didnt look that professional as your usual apps...with that typos

2) M.youtube.com works identical as on IE9, we did not touch that one. Go to desktop version of youtube, now you can watch the videos. Ill investigate the crash (damn WP7 so crash sensitive) hm, yeah i dont have any youtube-app installed for watching m.youtube.com-videos. didnt know you dont implement it yet. Still going to the official desktop version takes very long to load (on wifi, with 6mbit) and crashes when clicking on a video

3) Since 2/3 days VideoBB/VideoZer changed their parsing logic (I already submitted an update of the description and removed VideoBB/Videozer from the list). We are working hard to find a fix for this new system, but their security seem to have been thigtened up severly... sorry for the inconvenience. didnt know that, but wont use it. I just noticed it


4) Megaupload/Megaporn don't work? Can you show me an example of what you are trying to play. I mean I'm trying to do the best job possible, but I can not cover/test all scenarios myself and there were no complains during beta testing. I might have overlooked something. I dont know what you mean by the squares. You should have a pure megavideo link, not embedded. Ill implement an autoscanning feature later. oh, i thought you made the webpage work by showing legit videolinks. I just opened the startpage. Maybe there are just embedded links...have not looked at it really, as I dont use that site normally

I understand. I have already implemented tabs. But due to MS's odd policy I have to wait a couple of days before I can submit the update... bc I changed the description so they have to check the description before it can be published and in the meanwhile I can not submit an update...

Still there is a lot of work to do. But as all of you know, we are supporting something not natively supported and have to work with what we got.

But the tabs is implemented, so thats another feature completed... it will take some time to get it all working as expected.

EDIT:
Youtube crash is fixed. Dont know really why it occurs, but WP7 has some odd behaviour with certain task choosers.

As for tabs. I dont need that. Still it lags a few things, which makes the standard IE more useful. Autocompletion and normal IE loads atleast twice as fast. Here it looks like it has to load everything and then the page appears. Normal IE loads the page and you can look at it, while its loading the rest of the page.
The app still needs some updates if you want it to become useful. Now its just for some people...and others wont buy it...atleast for that price

This should not sound harsh or something, I like your apps...especially Walkman7...but I was kind of dissapointed after I bought it.

 

[gastrella]

the idea is very good thank but the desktop mode won't work properly .... i hope the next will make this browser the best

 

[dr.alkaiser]

Hi, I need to know if you can support Arabic language in this app or not? If yes it will be great job -even it's nice work now- because there isn't browser support Arabic language yet.
Thanks

 

[Marvin_S]

As for tabs. I dont need that. Still it lags a few things, which makes the standard IE more useful. Autocompletion and normal IE loads atleast twice as fast. Here it looks like it has to load everything and then the page appears. Normal IE loads the page and you can look at it, while its loading the rest of the page.
The app still needs some updates if you want it to become useful. Now its just for some people...and others wont buy it...atleast for that price

This should not sound harsh or something, I like your apps...especially Walkman7...but I was kind of dissapointed after I bought it.

well I agree with the above. The main focus is the video class, the more advanced browser came later.

Unfortunately wp7 is severly limited regarding the webbrowser element. Things like a context menu (tap and hold) and you can only use a mobile user agent. So we have to take a lot of dtours to make a desktop user agent work and it will never fully work since its just not possible, and neither do surfcube etc. Since they have the same handicapped webbrowser element. There is no possible way to match the speed of IE9.

Im working hard on an update and i hear people have crashes, I wish people could give me concrete examples so I can actually fix it. Im fixing the youtube crash... Which is also caused by buggy wp7 launchers. It takes a lot of time to optimize it.

I understand you are dissapointed and dont mind refunding it to you. My sole purpose is to make the platform go forwards, but unfortunately their is no much for us to work with so we have to write 100 of lines of code to implement the most simple features.

 

[Marvin_S]

I fixed some javascripting bugs (which will hopefully fix most of the crashes, if there are some crashing sites please report so I can verify).

Finished the tabs implementation.

Fixed the crash bug of youtube videos as well as the crash bug when opening pdf's and other files etc.

Again I hope this will iron out a lot of the annoyances with the app and hopefully solves most of the crashes. I am still investigating why VideoBB/VideoZer stopped working, but Ill need more time for that... XDA member dkp1977 offered his help and we will hopefully be able to find a way to support it again.

At least if MS hurries up, I can submit the update this week. There are still some changes in the description awaiting approval and since MS decided to have this weird update system, ill have to wait before I can submit the update for the description changes to be approved... its a pain in the ass, but thats the way it is unfortunately. I hope it will be approved on wednesday, so ill be able to submit the update wednesday evening for testing.

I am also planning a smart scan feature, which will scan the website and list all embedded video's on that page. Bc rerendering the websites trough javascript is quite slow and a difficult task to achieve, I figured this will be the best solution. Basically ill add smart screen to the menu box and when you will click it, it will parse the source code of the website and will scan it for video's from the implemented hosts.

Again my apologies for the rough start and some painfull bugs, I will do whatever I can do to make it better.

Regards

 

[Marvin_S]

the idea is very good thank but the desktop mode won't work properly .... i hope the next will make this browser the best

This is unfortunately not supported by wp7 api's and has to be done trough injecting javascript. No 3rd part browser has a fully working desktop version implementation unfortunately, as we dont have proper access to the user agent, we can not add it to actions with POST data and forms.

 

[Marvin_S]

Some good news and some bad news

Lets start off with the bad news:
Due to an issue with the screenshots Ill have to wait a week before I can submit the update...

The good news:
The update is ready to be released! (Just have to wait for MS to approve the new screenshots than I can submit the app for testing, f***ing apphub).

It features tabbed browsing!


Ive also implemented a work around for videobb and videozer, but its not officially supported... It might work, it might not work, it might crash. Im trying to get access to the flv's trough some work arounds and some redirecting and it works sometimes and I'm not sure for how long. This can hopefully be a temporary solution and hopefully I can find a way to get around it.
But at least it *might* work with shorter video's.

I have not been sitting still even almost failed an exam to hurry up the development. I've isolated some of the worst crash bugs, apparantly the implementation of the Desktop mode was not fully correct (yes thank you MS for letting me write 100 lines of code, instead of just give us an API to set the User Agent ). Anyway it looks better.

I still need to look at a way to scan for embedded video's this will be the next priority. The fixing of bugs and tabs took too much time to also include this.

The people who paid for the app can hit me up and ill send them a beta so they can have early access to this version, instead of having to wait a week.

Again my apologies for any inconvenience or delayed waits. The slowness of the apphub is not working in our advantage.

 

[marianpower]

good job. Thank you

 

[Marvin_S]

I hope my change in description will be accepted tonight and than hopefully I can submit an update finally...

It seems that the crash bugs have indeed been fixed and I also added a second host for videobb/videozer and Im still looking for a better way. Anybody with some flash decompile skills?

I've also opened a support email and a twitter. The support email is [email protected], the twitter is Metro_Browser. Ill integrate these in the app to keep all of you up to date with the latest status of the app from within the app.

Big thanks to all of you for the support. I've also started working on a scan method to scan webpages for embedded videos, this will not make it in the current update but will be part of the next.

Lets hope the next update will be accepted soon and I can make all of you satisfied with the app. I will raise the bar and try my best.

Any other features requested:
- Gorillavid support (Ill look into this later)
- Orientation lock (will hopefully be part of 1.3 update)
- Find on page (also v1.3 update)

V1.2 Changelog (to be released asap)
- Fixed javascript crashing bug.
- Implemented 2 new hosts for videobb/videozer (still not perfect but its a temporary solution, it seems an incredibly well designed security system).
- Tabs support (super fast switching between tabs).

Hopefully v1.2 can hit the MP at the end of this week.

Kind regards,

Marvin_S

 

[Marvin_S]

V1.2 has been submitted for testing. Major improvement, added Tabs, stability improvements, fixed javascript crash bugs.

Lets hope it will be approved and hit the marketplace later this week!

 

[dr.alkaiser]

How about adding Arabic Language to this browser? There is no browser read arabic correctly.