A few changes to speed up the BlackBerry browser

Dreams of the WebKit browser might run through our heads, but for current BlackBerry users it might be a far-off dream. As we learned on Friday, most current devices won’t be eligible for an OS 6 upgrade because it requires 512MB of ram, while most current models top out at 256MB. Since the WebKit browser comes with OS 6, that leaves many of us out of luck. There’s a chance that we’ll see a WebKit build for OS 5, but if that does happen it probably won’t happen for a while. So we’re left making the best of the current BlackBerry browser, which, as many users will tell you, is pretty bad. It’s better, but nowhere near the level of other smartphones. If you, like the rest of us, have to deal, you’re in a bit of luck. A while back Daniel from RIMarkable shared some tips on how to speed up the Blackberry browser. One of these we covered in our previous article on speeding up the BlackBerry browser, but that is nearly two years old now, and we’ve seen more recent (and better) builds since then. The first, though, remains the same. By turning off JavaScript you should see faster load times on pages. The more the page utilizes JavaScript, obviously, the bigger difference you’ll see. To do this, go to the browser, click menu, go into Options, then Browser Configuration. There you can uncheck the JavaScript box. You can opt to have the browser prompt you upon loading JavaScript, which seems like the ideal solution. Next, back out back to Browser Options and select General Properties. Under the setting Image Quality, select Low (faster). This, I can attest first-hand, will drastically speed up certain sites. I run a baseball site that uses many images from the AP photo archive. We usually set these to cover the span of our main column, so they’re usually pretty large. This is no problem for a cable modem connection, but on a 3G — or worse yet, EDGE — connection it can be a bit slower. If you visit sites that have multiple images I bet you’ll see a noticeable difference here. Finally, still in General Properties, you’ll want to change the Repeat Animations setting. It defaults at 100, but you can lower it to 10, or even one, without much noticeable difference. Again, how much this affects your browsing speed depends much on your browsing habits. Visit a lot of sites with repeating animations and you’ll see a difference. Any other tips you guys have in the bank for improving browser speed? And yes, we know that using BOLT browser or Opera Mini will also help enhance your browsing speed and experience.

About the Author

Joe Pawlikowski is the Senior Editor at MobileMoo.com and has been covering the mobile industry full time since 2007. When he's not writing about the tech scene, he can be found discussing his personal love - baseball (and more specifically the New York Yankees) as well as writing on his personal blog.