What quirks are in the Blackberry Web Browser that a developer should be aware of?

Question

Before I start pulling my hair out on any "known issues", is there any quirks or problems that I should be aware of.

Specifically with cookies, JavaScript, HTML, CSS and images.

PS I have a copy of the docs provided by RIM, but I'm hoping others know of some lesser known issues.

Answer 1

Here are a few that I've noticed:

• For some reason, the BB browser doesn't seem to handle underscores in the hostname correctly. I don't remember what happened, but if you hostname is like this: http://some_host/blah, I remember it having problems.

  • This can be corrected with a DNS entry that removes the _

• Another thing we've seen is serving up .jad files for Java downloads. If your module contains _ or other special characters, the BB browser displays a HTTP 500 error when trying to fetch the .jar or parse the .jad. This is especially annoying because it's not actually an HTTP error, the server is serving up a file, but the BB browser just can't parse it, so it blames the server.

  • We fixed this by using Fiddler to hit the .jad URL and view the contents of the HTTP response. If your .jad has any special characters (or sometimes URL/HTTP encoded strings) you might need to simplify your module name to only use A-Za-z0-9

I know those aren't exactly html/css things, but thought I'd post this anyway!

Answer 2

Check out the BlackBerry Browser Version 4.2 Content Developer Guide. It is for the older 4.2 browser but still has lots of good info about what HTML, CSS, and javascript is supported.

Answer 3

My experience with BB 8700 is that you should not use JavaScript, neither depend on CSS to be rendered correctly. It also has no flash player by default so you're off to plain server-side HTML form processing/ASP/CGI. Also beware of size, as internet can get pretty slow while on the road.

Answer 4

One known issue is that the Blackberry browser completely ignores the css display property, so you can't use display:none to hide content.

We've also had trouble with basic form submittal - sometimes, the POST doesn't happen at all, other times it happens but some or all of the form fields go AWOL. We haven't been able to get to the bottom of this issue, but it seems to occur mostly with the BB Curve series.