Tuesday, August 26, 2008

GMail in new Bunjalloo version

I've made a new release of Bunjalloo. This version adds inline images, amongst other things.

What I really want to discuss though is this comment that gronfeldt posted on the Bunjalloo wiki/discussion thing:
Comment by gronfeldt, Aug 07, 2008

The browser is great! It's great that the project is still active. I'm mostly
stoked about being able to access GMail, but after hours of trying everything I
can think of I'm still not having any luck. I found a blog somewhere that said:

"Luckily there is a work around - once logged in to the Google collective, you
can navigate to http://www.google.com/xhtml and from there to the Mobile GMail
portal. That works fine and has a better layout for the DS to boot."

The trouble is I can't get anywhere near a page that would allow me to log on
without having to wait a very long time only to receive a message saying
"Unable to load:........".

If someone who has been able to access GMail has a minute I would love it if
they could add a comment with the steps to getting access to GMail.

Thanks so much Richard for putting all this work into something for the
community, very admirable of you.
No problem gronfeldt! I hope this problem hasn't put you off. It's not too good that he couldn't access GMail, as it definitely works (for me, at least). A couple of things make it more difficult than it should be I suppose, so here are the instructions based on version 0.7.0.

First of all, navigate to https://mail.google.com. All ok so far.

Once the page loads, you will need to allow Google to set cookies. By default not all domains are allowed to set them, as this is a privacy problem and, on a limited memory device, a memory problem too. So select the options icon, then the cookie add icon. This is explained in the Bunjalloo wiki in more detail, just in case.

Allow the google.com top-level domain by selecting the radio button and clicking Accept. This means mail.google.com and www.google.com will both be able to do the cookie thing, which is required.

Now enter your user name and password as usual. Once entered, click the sign on button.

Now comes the tricky/buggy bit. There's a bug *somewhere* in Bunjalloo which causes the sign-on process to stop. You'll reach a redirect page and nothing seems to be happening (no more page loads), and it is because of the bug. I'm not sure why, but redirects screw up occasionally. Hitting refresh, or the "moved here" link fixes the problem though, and the sign on carries on... until it stops again :-)

Here it is due to the lack of javascript. So click the "no javascript" or "mobile device" link to finally log in to gmail

That's it! Wasn't it easy? ;-) Next time cookies will be allowed, so you will only have to log-on/refresh/click. I'll keep trying to improve this as it is currently rather annoying, but hey! it (mostly) works. Shame SSL is so slow :-(

There are 2 places with room for improvement here. First, cookies are currently only partially implemented. They should be stored to disk as well as in memory, obeying the correct caching and expiry rules. This would mean that your log in session would be remembered between reboots. There's a lot of work needed there. Secondly, the redirection logic is broken. This is tricky to debug and has been plaguing Bunjalloo pretty much since I started so I would like to fix it "soon".