[sugar] Needs for Browse

[Bryan Berry]

I was working w/ Trinarayan today on running flash activities on the XO
and we came upon a lot of features we need in Browse. For the moment we
are using firefox 3 but would like to use Browse instead.

1. Display flash by default. A lot of existing educational resource use
flash. Some people don't like turning on flash because it slows down a
lot of pages. We want it turned on because most of the sites of
educational value either use flash heavily or not at all. We don't care
if www.tv.com is slow or Myspace takes a long time to load.


2. Tabs -- we need them
It takes too long to alt+tab between multiple instance of Browse. I
don't think kids will be confused by multiple tabs but we can test this
out soon.

3. Browse doesn't find Flash's settings.sol file. Flash needs permission
to open html files on the local machine. We intend these files to be in
the flash activity bundle and this permission has to be set in
settings.sol

While we are developing some of our activities in flash, because we can
do it faster than in EToys. We are still doing activity development with
EToys, just not all of it in EToys. It is impossible to hire someone w/
Squeak experience in Nepal and very time-consuming for them to get
up-to-speed. 


Thought for the day: Flash is important! 

The folks more likely to develop learning activities will come from a
webdev/graphic design background and less likely kernel hackers. The
former type are quite familiar w/ Flash, html, and photoshop. As much as
we would like them to use Squeak or Python to develop activities, it's
gonna take a while. Let's not shut them out by not supporting flash
well.

Also, countries that have invested heavily in IT already have typically
also invested heavily in flash.