Kindle Paperwhite browser
| Screen resolution | 768 × 1024, 16 shades of gray |
| Viewport size | 758 × 899 |
| Browser | WebKit-powered |
| User Agent (javascript) | Mozilla/5.0 (X11; ; U; Linux armv7l; en-us) AppleWebKit/534.26+ (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/5.0 Safari/534.26+ |
| User Agent (http header) | Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux armv7l like Android; en-us) AppleWebKit/531.2+ (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/5.0 Safari/533.2+ Kindle/3.0+ |
| Acid3 | 100/100 |
| HTML5 Test | 212/555 |
| CSS3 Test | 45% |
Kindle Paperwhite is a new e-book reader by Amazon, equipped with e-ink touch-screen, Wi-Fi and, optionally, 3G.
Peperwhite’s Browser is an improved version of Kindle Keyboard's browser. Browser’s performance increased significantly compared to the predecessor, its support for HTML5 features improved.
Paperwhite’s user-agent string is weird. While http header contains quite typical user-agent string, navigator.userAgent contains another, which can be hardly identified among the dozens of other WebKits. Yet another reason to use feature detection.
Feature tests
Feature tests are done using Modernizr. Full table of my tests on google docs.
| Feature | Test | Actual result |
|---|---|---|
| backgroundsize | True | True |
| bgsizecover | True | True |
| borderradius | True | True |
| boxshadow | True | True |
| boxsizing | True | True |
| cssanimations | True | True (-webkit-) |
| cssgradients | True | True (-webkit-) |
| csstransforms | True | True (-webkit-) |
| csstransforms3d | False | True (-webkit-) |
| csstransitions | True | True (-webkit-) |
| fontface | True | True |
| mediaqueries | True | True |
| opacity | True | True |
| rgba | True | True |
| textshadow | True | True |
| touch | False | False |
| video | False | False |
Animations
Just like the predecessor, Kindle Paperwhite supports animation and transitions, which is a painful sight considering e-paper’s response time.
Touch
New Kindle doesn’t have any hardware keys and is fully controlled from the touch screen. The browser is controlled with habitual swipe and pinch gestures. Touch events, however, are not supported.
Links
All the links are forced with text-decoration: underline. But, unlike on Kindle Keyboard, on Paperwhite you can redefine this using !important:
h1.title a {
text-decoration: none !important; /* no underline for Kindle! */
}Fonts
All the major font formats are supported (woff, ttf and svg). The browser has weird intolerance for Scada font:
Other fonts seem to work just fine.
Scrolling
Scrolling isn’t that slick when it come to internal scrollable blocks. If, for instance, there’s an internal block with horizontal scroll occupying entire viewport, it’s very problematic to scroll the page as all your attemps lead to that block being scrolled horizontally instead:
box-shadow bug
If there is a shadow going outside of the viewport, or there is a block with box-shadow sitting somewhere outside of the viewport (even if it’s in the overflow of the other block), viewport expands to fit the shadow. Rather weird and annoying bug.
Forms
The browser has rudimentary support for new input types. range slider barely works:
There’s no validation, and, therefore, no support for required and pattern attributes.
Conclusion
Evolutionary descendant of the previous generation. There’s a big chance your mobile-optimized site will work just fine on new Kindle without any additional tweaks.
Non-mobile sites also work quite adequately.