> I don't know what the folks at Amazon were thinking when they make the browser suck this much.
I've heard it's quite simple: the browser was only ever included in the first place as a way to log into public Wi-Fi networks like coffee shops which have a screen you need to log in through.
As long as the browser is good enough to log you in, Amazon's happy. Which is why, after almost 10 years, I think the browser is still labeled as "experimental". (At least last I checked.)
Especially since they were footing the bill for cell data with the early devices, it's hard to imagine they'd really want you to use it for Web surfing for sure. But the device also isn't very well suited to that.
For years, I used my Kindle + Google Voice as my portable “phone.”
I’d get voicemails (transcribed) and text messages to my Gmail and could text back from there. Gmail even had a lite version that worked quite well on the Kindle’s experimental browser. Fortunately, my needs for making/receiving an actual call on-the-go were nearly non-existent so it worked quite well.
Was really sad when they pulled the plug on the free 3G.
> The ESP32 is a microcontroller that has very little RAM and isn't quite suited to deal with HTML and such. So I had to use a Raspberry Pi as a rendering proxy and transforms the RSS and the text on the page so that the ESP32 can digest.
The Kindle doesn't come with a lot of onboard horsepower, and putting the same class of SoC as a Raspberry Pi in one would likely increase cost and have other tradeoffs.
I'm assuming the Kindle is using an i.MX6 or better NXP SOC, because they are basically the only ones shipping an integrated EPD controller with Linux drivers, which should be more than capable of parsing and rendering HTML. The Remarkable series runs Qt on these chips and is able to render ePub documents just fine.
I've heard it's quite simple: the browser was only ever included in the first place as a way to log into public Wi-Fi networks like coffee shops which have a screen you need to log in through.
As long as the browser is good enough to log you in, Amazon's happy. Which is why, after almost 10 years, I think the browser is still labeled as "experimental". (At least last I checked.)