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Mozilla's Mini-Me
An anonymous contributor writes "LinuxDevices has a story by the leaders of the 'Minimo' (Mini Mozilla) project, an effort to reduce Mozilla's code and runtime footprints and optimize its display for the small screens on embedded devices. The Minimo authors believe Minimo will become the browser of choice on embedded Linux devices with 64MB of RAM."
There's nothing I hate more than having to scroll sideways on a website.
I don't suppose they call this a mini-dupe? It is a clone after all!
----
Go canucks, habs, and sens!
It's not just Zaurus, it would be really, REALLY nice to have a browser alternative for handhelds that doesn't require switching OSs (frequently a mess since there are so many differences, both ROM and hardware) or abandoning all your software and trying to find handheld-capable Linux alternatives.
It Would Be Nice, Wouldn't It?
So now it only requires 64 MB of RAM to format text and pictures, eh? I ran my first web browser on a computer with 32 MB of RAM. And what about Dillo, which has only 400k of source code?
... but will this browser be able to do anything that my current Opera install cannot? I use Mozilla on my desktop and its great, but it has always seemed a bit bloated. Far too much to be able to do something with it for the handhelds. But then again, I may be wrong. We shall see.
Of course we thought it was an enormous resource hog back then too :-). And I didn't see how the web could possibly replace gopher!
Hard too believe it's going to be small enough. ;-)
My desk computer has 128MB of ram! (Adding another 512MB later today.) Seriously, when did 64MB become the yardstick for compact embedded systems?
Hey! Let's just crosspost everything from OSNews, and like, not even change the titles much. Oh, wait!!! It's been done! Nevermind.
Heck... these whipper-snappers today all want their fancy-schmancy pictures and animated graphics. In my day we used LYNX and LIKED IT!!!
But seriously... why doesn't someone start low-graphic mini-browsers. They could use LYNX or some other text-based browser. After all, when you're looking at a very limited amount of real-estate on your screen, do you really care about missing out on those stupid "Punch The Monkey" ads?
Pheh... give me the good old days of BBSes.
-TheTXLibra
"You've got no kids, no wife, no job, and you're not in The Tigger Movie!!!" - my best friend's son, Gabe, at 5 years old.
-The Libra
"Please be patient--The future will begin momentarily."
Embedded *free* browser of choice maybe. Opera still has a rather large development advantage on small screen devices.
64 MB of RAM? WTF? Opera 7.5 is 3.5 MB without Java and it includes not only small screen rendering, but a full featured browser, mail client, newreader, rss reader, download manager, and IRC client.
These Mozilla guys need to smoke less crack and get their act together.
Mozilla keeps impressing me more and more. Already I use Thunderbird/Firefox exclusively. I wonder what Mozilla has in store for these programs? With Firefox especially being as good as it is now, what does the future have in store?
-Dizzle
"I most likely AM so interested in myself."
I would kill for a decent browser on PocketPC(2002). I know it's a Microsoft platform, and worse yet, it's a total half-baked mess, but I have to use it at work. Pocket Internet Explorer can't even access OWA (outlook web access properly). I know that a real browser could easily fit into 32MB RAM with 400mhz of ARM power, I just don't see Microsoft providing that.
Mozilla, VLC, and a decent MP3 player would make the PocketPC almost bareable.
(-1, Raw and Uncut is the only way to read)
If the browser works well in a 64MB platform, why won't it run well in a 256MB system?
I didn't see anything as a downside to using Minimo as opposed to Mozilla.
Fight Spammers!
The Geronimo Project has been working on this same copncept for about 2 years now. Why reinvent the wheel?
Natural Selection: self-destruction of the poor and lazy
if they wanted to create a mini-mi package, why didn't they start with the firefox codebase ... my guess is the browser would rock
Never underestimate the power of idiots in large groups
Its gonna be just the same as it is now on desktops with the full versions. You can have the good browser or the free browser, its your choice.
This does seem like a very good move for Mozilla. Now, it may increase market-share and we could see more websites that demand IE.
However I suspect people will buy WinCE devices and run IE because they want something as similar to their desktop PCs as possible.
The "reduce Mozilla's code and runtime footprints" features sound good for the regular desktop Mozilla experience as well. Why not demand tight, efficient outside of the handheld environment?
Don't blame Durga. I voted for Centauri.
While we're at it can someone come up with a way to shrink the Mozilla mascot. I just marvel at the possibilities.
My Shrink: "Delusional."
Me: "I swear, its a 5 inch tall dinosaur living in my glovebox!"
My Shrink: "Sure, Nurse please get this man a tranqil... um.... mint from the special jar."
You teach a child to read and he or her will be able to pass a literacy test. - George W. Bush
If there were a crossplatform engine to handle ecmascript and xul, that ran on Linux, PocketPC and Palm, this could get really exciting.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
To be the "browser of choice for handhelds with 64MB of RAM" is a stupid idea, sir.
Why not aim for two or three MB of RAM, and hope to scale upwards?
This ain't rocket science, folks.
I thought it would be nice for slashdot to report the release of Mozilla 1.8a since it's already doing a mozilla article. As reported on osnews.com
e le ases/mozilla1.8a1/
ftp://ftp.mozilla.org/pub/mozilla.org/mozilla/r
The Zaurus, and other embedded Linux distros tend to use Qtopia instead of X. Although X can be installed, it's sort of a power user thing right now, and believe it or not, not all Zaurus owners are Linux experts, and some who are don't want to deal with all the extra bloat that installing X requires. Minimo would gain a lot of users if they made a Qtopia port.
I know, it's old; it's a 1998-vintage Dell that wears like iron and currently I wouldn't trade it for anything ('cept maybe a new Powerbook).
Getting a decent web experience on the thing is a pain; even Firefox skirts the edge of usability. Dillo is ok for vieweing software docs but is hit-or-miss on the "real" intarweb.
Something like Minimo would be nice for those of us who're still a little behind the times, portable-wise.
N4st0r, trixx0r h0bb1tz0rz! Th3y st0l3 0ur pr3c10uzz!
The device is what has 64 megs of RAM. It doesn't mean the minimo has a memory footprint that is 64 Megs.
...how soon will PDAs boot directly into Mozilla?
I know, i know... not too soon. Nor should Mozilla worry about the hardware side of things... So let's just say you boot linux and "use Mozilla as your shell", whatever that means.
But imagine the consequences of a beautiful, persistent, PDA platform-independent "netGUI" that was extensible and modular... Sounds like Microsoft may soon perceive its toes to be stepped upon again. The next showdown? Mozilla vs WinCE.
Is Mozilla becoming a reasonable platform for PDA application development? Sounds like that...
?/o
I prefer dillo... it's just so damn fast... and is much more minimo.
Yes, minimo does render much better than minimo... but if I'm going that way, I might as well go to firefox... which I do.
My fav on the Z is qt opera 7 + full screen.
Next is dillo (xft?) under pdaXrom... and firefox.
Homer: Umm ... I guess I'll take that one.
Salesman: Well, do you need a paperweight? 'Cause if you buy that machine, that's all you're going to have, an expensive paperweight.
Homer: Well, a paperweight would be nice, but what I really need is a computer. How about that one? [points to a second machine]
Salesman: That technology is three months old. Only suckers buy out-of-date machines. You're not a sucker, are you sir?
Homer: Heavens no!
Salesman: Oh good, because if you were, I'd have to ask you to leave the store.
Homer: I just need something to receive email.
Salesman: [whistles] You'll need a top-of-the-line machine for that. [shows Homer a top-of-the-budget machine] That's the same computer astronauts use to do their taxes.
Homer: I was an astronaut.
Salesman: Of course you were.
True story.
Think Opera, it is a nice, fast web processor weighting about 5Mb when statically compiled (for Linux). And it also runs embedded. Maybe the folks at Opera managed to capitalize from the parallel development of an embedded and a desktop version of the same browser ... of course, they benefit from using Qt/QtEmbedded too I guess!
because PocketPC has PocketIE built in. You will pay for that ROM space whether or not you use it. It is best compared with the problems of separating IE from any other Windows OS, but less doable because of the integration on ROM. If you have a large program such as a browser, you don't really want it taking space in RAM. If you have a pocket-Moz it would be cool but I guess it would be better if you could build your own ROM image so you could lose IE. With a Pocket Linux you can.
See my journal, I write things there
We were using browsers on computers that only had 16M on memory. Perhaps I'm just ignorant of new browser requirements. I understand that the entire device OS and application code would have to reside in the same 64M space, and you won't have a nice disk in which to cache pages for faster viewing, but if you're only going to be caching text and the occasional small image, how much space do you need? What is the smallest footprint in which to use for a browser?
There hasn't been a lot of releases lately; I've been searching and I was wondering if Minimo would be a suitable replacement for Mozilla in 486-pentium boxes...
KDE's KHTML is already being used in devices with little memory and slower CPUs
Screenshots include Google, Slashdot, and even The Onion.
Whats more is that the it is a fully featured browser (SSL, screen resizing, etc). And it does not require X to run.
Sunny Dubey
In other news Mozilla's new name will be Fat Bastard
...
Striving to be common
Striving to be common...
Minimo would gain a lot of users if they made a Qtopia port.
It starts.
I hope this will in some way benefit the normal Mozilla. It would be nice to have some of the memory saving changes being added to the Mozilla tree, because Mozilla and the Gecko renderer feel even on fairly recent hardware more bloated than for example KHTML.
"LinuxDevices has a story by the leaders of the 'Minimo' (Mini Mozilla) project..."
Heh I'm a little surprised after all the copyright trouble they've had with names that they used this one.
(Note: Before you hit the reply button, I'm not saying that they are in violation of anything, I'm thinking more about 'knee-jerk danger avoidance'....)
"Derp de derp."
... but will this browser be able to do anything that my current Opera install cannot?
Yes: it will be able to be modified freely, ported to more platforms, and incorporated into open source software.
there are just untold millions of computers out there still on the net, running minimal RAM. I've tried a bunch of them, sad to say older versions of explorer seem to require the least amount, of any of the well known browsers I've tried. My latest was on a toshiba satellite laptop, only 16 megs of ram, tried moz, firefox, opera, and it had explorer 5, 5 worked the best. I'd like an alternative, moz functionality (more or less), with minimum resources. I'll be giving this thing a tryout.
On my old macs, iCab is the one to beat, now there's a full featured browser that is light, although lately it's been creeping up as well.
Ummm call me an old fart here but I don't think that is exactly a small, or could be considered embedded. Given people have written decent browsers (e.g. Opera, and a few cracking J2ME ones) which run in 10s of K and at make 100 this really isn't anything special or challenging.
1995 - NCSA Mosaic, IBM PC, 16Mb of RAM.
I for one am not impressed at a project that considers embedded devices as having to have 64Mb of RAM, that is just a PC with a small screen.
Move on folks, its only on Slashdot because they mentioned Linux.
An Eye for an Eye will make the whole world blind - Gandhi
OK, so these cmments seem to be misconception city at the moment.
So, just for clarifcation:
MiniMo is built from exactly the same codebase as Mozilla / Firefox / Thunderbird. If you want to build MiniMo, you can do so straight from a standard Mozilla CVS pull (see the Mozilla.org site for build instructions). That means a lot of the work done to make MiniMo 'lightweght' has had a direct effect on the 'main' Mozilla codebase.
Mozilla and Firefox are mostly the same backend code. MiniMo has a different GUI from either Firefox or Mozilla. So 'building from the Firefox codebase' doesn't mean anything - from the point of view of the backend, Mozilla and Firefox are the same product.
64Mb of RAM may seem like a lot. But consider the demands being placed on a Modern web browser. It has to take untrusted data from the web (in a large number of formats), create a DOM tree, create a render tree (for CSS rules), interpret scripts, allow those scripts to update both the render and DOM tree, deal with UI widgets and interaction (think slashdot with mod points), deal with networking and cache and so on and so forth. It takes more memory than your 1995 browser because your 1995 browser does a tiny fraction of what a 2004 browser does. Grab an old copy of Mosaic and surf the web a while. Notice most sites are broken. That's not something that would be considered acceptable on a PDA and so PDAs need modern browsers. Modern browsers do a rather complex job and they use a lot of resources in the process.
Testing indicates that neither pocket PC nor Opera run acceptably in 32Mb of RAM. 64Mb of RAM is a baseline for getting any modern browser to run.
If you don't think it's acceptable, complain to the people who want scripting on their websites. And to the people who want complex style rules. And all the other people who want to use complex features that require lots of memory to process. Not the browser makers who implement the features their users demand.
I started my online life with a 486 laptop with 8 MB running Windows 3.1. Browsing with IE, Netscape and Opera (the fastest). Even ran a web server, Wsplug, to server my first homepages.
This 400 MHz K6 laptop with 160 MB is blazingly fast with Firefox (or whatever it's called this week), almost overkill :)
Escher was the first MC and Giger invented the HR department.
Yes, another 64 megs comment.
.classes included to run your soft.
I'd love to have 64 megs of RAM for the devices I develop for.
Reminder:
- On J2ME, you have 64K of JAR size for most small devices. And that is in Java, mind you.
- On J2ME, you have less than 200K or RAM,
- On Brew, you have in the likes of 300-500K to run your software.
- On Palm OS (older versions) you have 128K to run your stuff.
- On most PocketPC, you have to restrain yourself to a few megs TOP. More than 4 megs and you are bound to have problems due to the small slider indicating how much RAM is allocated to storage and how much RAM is allocated to software.
- On most Smartphones, you have to restrain yourself to maybe 8 megs.
64 megs... *sheesh* I'd wish!
While I'd love to see the "ultimate" browser made for Palm OS, the fact that we have a few decent choices already may be why you're not hearing the chorus of "me too's" that you're hearing from the Pocket PC crowd. Or maybe it's that Palm OS users don't read /. (ha! beat you to it...muhahahaha).
Just out of curiosity, I fired up Lynx, and it's only using 3KB of memory. So if the only goal is to make a browser that's quick and functional, they're seriously overkilling it.
But that's not the goal here. Look at all the stuff Lynx isn't doing. I'm not sure it even does tables properly.
My impression is that the goal is to take a mostly standards-compliant browser and make it suitable for handhelds, without sacrificing that compliance. Consider all the standards that involves, none of which existed in the early browsers you mentioned: CSS, Javascript, XML, DHTML, the list goes on. Further, I'm guessing they'll want to try and keep the user experience as similar as possible, which means keeping things like graphics display, popup blocking, plugins, XUL, etc.
Also consider the fact that handhelds are surfing the same Moore's Law as desktops. The RAM just keeps on coming. The trend that made this project inconceivable two years ago, and possible today, will make it almost a non-issue a few years down the road.
You want the truthiness? You can't handle the truthiness!
The Minimo authors believe Minimo will become the browser of choice on embedded Linux devices with 64MB of RAM.
How about for my old P-166?
check out http://www.offbyone.com
;p
its 1mb, can run off a disk/network whatever, runs on most all windows. only http 3.2 standards, but thats images+frames, so its nicer than lynx
my blog
You don't need to be a rocket scientist to realize that aiming for "two or three MB of RAM" using Mozilla codebase is not realistic.
To even think that's in the realm of possibility is insane.
Are you sure that Lynx is not taking 3MB of memory? 3K seems low.
Unfortunately, Moore's law doesn't apply to handhelds very well. I was working with a 206Mhz 64MB iPaq almost three years ago. You still cannot buy a common handheld with more than 64 MB ram. 400 Mhz Xscale processors are only marginally more performant than the 206 MHz StrongArms in most tasks.
The innovation of the last three years seems to be wireless networking. Display, processor power, and ram have not improved much. VGA displays may be the next big improvement, but they are extremely uncommon at the moment.
I would love to have a 128+ MB PDA with a USB 2.0 Host controller, but I don't see it happening anytime soon.
Just out of curiosity, I fired up Lynx, and it's only using 3KB of memory. So if the only goal is to make a browser that's quick and functional, they're seriously overkilling it.
:) Anyway, using IE on my WinCE device uses similar amounts of RAM, at least for pages that aren't using a ton of big images and the like. Does tables properly, too.
OK, I can't help it- but 3KB? Perhaps you mean 3 MB.
Working toward a usable PDA environment in the spirit of Newton OS: Dynapad
While minimo targets Linux; it inherently is largely applicable to another environment - especially since they expect the front-end to be rewritten by someone using it in a real application.
Worldgate was going to use Mozilla for it's next-generation browse-the-web-on-your-cable-box application, where the browsers all run in servers at the headend and send screen images down to the settops as MPEG stills. We ran over 20 copies of Mozilla (tuned in ways similar to minimo) on 500Mhz P3's with 512MB of memory, and performance was reasonable. We lived with scroll bars where we had to (we subverted a few things to let pages fit tighter, but we also had to use larger-than-normal fonts). For added fun we had no mouse, but we had keyboards.
The toughest part was "geometric navigation" of links/etc with arrow keys; before development on that ended when we sold off our patents/business we'd mostly gotten that working, but there are more edge cases than you can count (nested and inline frames, imagemaps, etc).
"The Minimo authors believe Minimo will become the browser of choice on embedded Linux devices with 64MB of RAM."
64 mb of ram? what about the majority of embedded systems with less than this?
Why does Opera seem to run faster on my computer. I understand that systems are complex, & we need to do better bench marking, etc., & I do agree with what you just said, but I do think that it does run faster.
In your experience, does Mozilla run faster than Opera?
testing out my trending skills
...OSX except for webshots, so I can't relate. Jobs took a dedicated macfanatic (moi), someone who's still got a functioining 512k kicking around someplace, and priced at least one guy out of his products. Just when they were getting cheap enough, zap, they keep upping the ante. Then I discoverd open source and linux, etc, haven't looked back. I like and endorse the philosophy, and the quality is there, just need some skull sweat now and then.
On iCab, all I know is on my olden daze macs, it's still the best browser. Just upgraded on my powerbook 1400 (166/64) a coupla weeks ago in fact. And I can surf perfectly adequately with even an old 25 mghz machine (280c PB, 68k moto) and just a little ram using iCab.
Of course, that goes to the OS as well, we keep losing ground it appears, the newer stuff needs orders of magnitudes more powerful machines just to maintain even ground.
side issue, but I had wished apple would have open sourced classic OS when they switched, I always liked it. Safe to use (more or less, mostly more, I never had any issues with it), easy to use, performed well. I mean, what would it be to mac anyway? None of the old machines can run OSX, but some people will hang on to them. Apple being thoughtful like that to old fans would go a long way to restoring loyalty and perhaps more of an urge to upgrade to a new machine and OSX. They won't even bust loose with some downloads of like 8.6.
pretty impressive! I never fooled with an atari, had no idea they were capable of this.
...turn it sideways so you'll be scrolling up and down. :-)
Stop the world; I need to get off.
I havent run opera 7, the last time I used it was 6. But I stil have 6 around. I think they're about the same speed. Seriously these days computers are so fast it doesnt even matter anymore. It's like 5 milliseconds vs 6 - you're not going to notice. They're both faster than hell.
However I dont use opera because it renders pages like ass. Maybe version 7 is a lot better but I've just never liked it that much anyways in terms of interface, adn that dreaded banner ad.
Joseph?
Okay, so I was off by a factor of 1000. My point still stands. :)
God, I've always wanted to say that.
I looked at the output of top again, and if 3K is 1.0% of my total memory, I'm seriously screwed.
You want the truthiness? You can't handle the truthiness!
testing out my trending skills
Gosh, how can they possibly manage to render a *web page* on an embedded device with *only* 64 megabytes of memory? Good luck to the project developers, but I think they face an impossible task.
BTW, for a lightweight graphical web browser I like dillo, it's what I am using to post this comment. The main downside is that it doesn't do SSL very well.
-- Ed Avis ed@membled.com
Wake me up when they can fit a full browser that also does .doc, .xls, .pdf, text and Flash into 1.5MB. Heh, "mini". Good one.
Install the Internet? That must have been one hell of a task. How many CD's does it come on?
Unless they have something better than that, I'd say they are full of FUD, and trying to justify the difficulties they are having getting Minimo below 64 M.
Clever signature text goes here.
While Opera 7.0x, 7.1x and 7.2x were terrible, the new 7.5x is way faster than any of its predecessors. It even beats out Firefox in terms of pure speed.
Opera does have other quirks though. When using it with a proxy server (privoxy) it tends to not get all the information on a page. This is more apparent on pages with lots (>80) images.
Mozilla and Firefox dont miss a single image.
Yet Socrates himself is particularly missed.
A lovely little thinker but a bugger when he's pissed.
No, it didn't do Flash, and unfortunately, yes, it did Javascript, and IIRC 2.0 was the version where you couldn't turn it off. Didn't need CSS, because most web page designers mostly understood the HTML philosophy that the reader's browser is what decides how to display things, not the author, and that not everybody has the latest 21" screen on their Palm Pilot.
Text-based software doesn't mean you're limited to CLIs - there was this "vi" thing that came out in ~1980, and curses, and Nethack. I ran X Windows on the 386/33 machines at work, and on the Sun3s, and while it's not as fast as today, it was just fine for handling lots of editor windows and animated clocks and simple graphing applications and interactive maps. It didn't have the horsepower of the HP 9000 workstations which I'd used in the late 80s that had 48MB of video RAM, and it was annoying to use 640x400 graphics when the slower Sun2 had had 1152x900, but you weren't limited to text-mode.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks