<\/p>\n

There is a major new release of\u00a0 the UCWEB browser in the works.\u00a0 It’s Version 7.0 and is already in its second Beta.\u00a0 The official Beta releases are Chinese only but several users have created English translations and posted them to the UCWEB User Forum<\/a>.<\/p>\n

No one seems to have translated the Symbian S60 3rd edition variant of\u00a0 7.0 Beta 2 yet, so I’m running a Java ME version on my N95, UC Browser 7 Beta 2 Java Script Improvement<\/em><\/a> by Manojr Tiwari “mannuforall” and I’m generally quite pleased with it.\u00a0 Rendering (always UCWEB’s weakest point) seems generally improved and there are new fonts with bold support. But the biggest change is that for the first time a UCWEB Java version properly wraps English text<\/strong> (image below, right) rather than splitting words across two lines as 6.3 does (image below, left).\u00a0 You can’t believe how much that annoyed me.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

I’m hopping that the fact that UCWEB created new Latin fonts set and fixed the word wrap issue, which never effected Chinese rendering, means that we will finally see a new official English version.\u00a0 The latest official English release is 6.3, which is getting to look pretty dated with it’s word-wrap issue and lack of features introduced in versions 6.5, 6.7 and 7.0.<\/p>\n

A new English release is really needed\u00a0 because the 7.0 clients don’t seem to work properly with UCWEB 6.3’s US based English server farm.\u00a0 While you can download an unofficial translation of\u00a0 the UCWEB 7 Beta 2 which uses the 6.3 English server, when using it I get nothing but\u00a0 a blank page with the majority of URLs I’ve tried.\u00a0 It seems that 7.0 only works correctly with a 7.0 server and the only 7.0 servers currently available are in China.\u00a0 Speed isn’t a problem with the Chinese servers, however the fact that they are behind the infamous “Great Firewall of China” is.<\/strong> Access to many popular sites including Bloglines, Facebook, Blogger sites, Twitter.com and the all the third party Twitter front ends I tried seems to be blocked.\u00a0 At least I think that’s what happening as when I try to visit any of those sites I end up on some sort of Chinese language error page.<\/p>\n

UCWEB 7.0 Beta 2.0’s JavaScript support seems to have\u00a0 been improved.\u00a0 Sites that use complex AJAX, like Orkut and the desktop version of Google Reader, generally don’t function properly\u00a0 in UCWEB 6.3, or in Opera Mini 4.2 and 5.0, for that matter.\u00a0 With 7.0 Beta 2, Google Reader\u00a0 (image top, right) works as expected as does the desktop version of Orkut.<\/p>\n

However, until the US servers are updated to support 7.0, which probably won’t happen until there is an official English 7.0 release, the utility of UCWEB 7.0 for me is limited because two of my favorite sites, Twitter and Bloglines are blocked.\u00a0 Which is a shame because UCWEB7.0\u00a0 is otherwise a great browser, it’s fast, does a great job with file uploads and downloads, supports tabbed browsing and has the ability to copy and paste page content, URLs and selected text both between pages within the browser and to other applications using the system clipboard.\u00a0 My favorite UCWEB feature though is that it reformats all pages to fit screen width so that horizontal scrolling is never required.<\/p>\n

The Great Firewall does let lots of sites through including Orkut, Googe Reader, My Opera, the BBC, CNN and ESPN, so depending on which site you frequent, the firewall may or may not be an issue for you.<\/p>\n

This is also the first UCWEB unofficial English translation that doesn’t send “ch-zn” in the accept-language\u00a0 HTTP header.\u00a0 That caused lots of sites to deliver their Chinese versions with no easy way to get to the English one. With mannuforall’s 7.0 Beta 2 I get English pages for most of the\u00a0 sites where I used to get Chinese.\u00a0 The exception is with most of Google’s products which seem to be looking at the request’s IP address rather than the language header and still deliver Chinese content.<\/p>\n

You can download UC Web 7.0 for Java ME phones from the UC Web Forum<\/a> (registration and a least one post required) or\u00a0 from Manojr’s blog<\/a> or by using these direct download links. .JAR<\/a>, .JAD<\/a><\/p>\n

Related Posts<\/em>:
\nSpeed Test \u2013 Opera Mini, Bolt, Skyfire and UCWEB<\/a>
\nNew UCWEB 6.6 Beta<\/a>
\nUCWEB 6.5 English Beta<\/a>
\nUCWEB 6.3 Official Signed English Version Released for S60<\/a>
\nOfficial Release of UCWEB 6.3 For Java ME<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

There is a major new release of\u00a0 the UCWEB browser in the works.\u00a0 It’s Version 7.0 and is already in its second Beta.\u00a0 The official Beta releases are Chinese only but several users have created English translations and posted them to the UCWEB User Forum. No one seems to have translated the Symbian S60 3rd edition variant of\u00a0 7.0 Beta 2 yet, so I’m running a Java ME version on my N95, UC Browser 7 Beta 2 Java Script Improvement … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":14511,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[38],"tags":[497,974,254,280],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/wapreview.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5625"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/wapreview.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/wapreview.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wapreview.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wapreview.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5625"}],"version-history":[{"count":13,"href":"https:\/\/wapreview.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5625\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5636,"href":"https:\/\/wapreview.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5625\/revisions\/5636"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wapreview.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/14511"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/wapreview.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5625"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wapreview.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5625"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wapreview.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5625"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}