Slashdot Mirror
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."
Embedded *free* browser of choice maybe. Opera still has a rather large development advantage on small screen devices.
Opera has a browser for these kinds of devices that let you scroll down instead of up. Hopefully this can be just as good.
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
They are actually saying Minimo requires about 25 MBs of RSS, to me this is still way too high. Another point is that much as I love Firefox, the already stripped down browser, its a memory pig. The longer it runs, the more it uses.
Do not try to read the dupe, thats impossible. Instead, only try to realize the truth
What truth?
There is no dupe
If you read the article, they are talking about rendering a fully compliant webpage. They did mention Opera and PocketIE. Both failed to render at 32MB. From the article:
"We have run the same tests using Opera and Pocket IE on 32MB device form factors, and neither can make it though the page load test based on their lack of browser content and standards support, or they just simply run out of memory trying to display the pages."
I don't think they are talking about the size of the binary distribution, but the size of all the components loaded into RAM and rendering compliant webpages.
"Rocky Rococo, at your cervix!"
> Is Opera on your handheld?
l ti ple/
If he has a Zaurus it probably is.
http://www.opera.com/products/smartphone/dev/mu
25% Funny, 25% Insightful, 25% Informative, 25% Troll
You mean like Thunderhawk or Netfront? There are several browsers for PocketPC out there. You just need to look.
"Have you ever thought about just turning off the TV, sitting down with your kids, and hitting them?"
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!
A mini-firefox project does make more sense, and I want one in hopes that they don't include that bizarre memory leak "feature" in by default. The one where if you let firefox sit there for a while and you keep opening new pages, firefox's memory usage goes from 20 MB up to 150 MB.
It's happened to me, but a fix for it was to type about:config and set 'browser.cache.memory.enable' to 'false'
www.google.com
Try Opera,
or Links v2 with svga graphics, poor pics, but the tables render nicely.
My note only has 40Mb of ram! A 1995 Digital HiNote Ultra 2!
JoeR
Minimo would gain a lot of users if they made a Qtopia port.
It starts.
Yes, it's on my Sony Ericsson P800 smartphone. I have maybe 7Mb free ram for it to use when browsing the web - and it works perfectly.
it's in my head
Check out Ben Goodger's blog.
Check out Konq-E. (Konquereor Embedded) It is stripped down Konq that runs against Qt and some stub KDE classes. Works really well! It renders web pages better than Moz, and for the performce/space/features it can't be beat, except for a few co mmercial offerings.. Oh yeah, did i mention full JAVASCRIPT? And it is based off of Konquerer 3.2!
Slashdot's rate-of-post filter: Preventing you from posting too many great ideas at once.
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.
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 love to break it to people when they just don't get it.
Firefox is only about an 8 MB download, and Mozilla is around 12-16. Sure, they're both bigger than Opera, but the size of the executable says nothing about how much memory it will use while running.
Okay, say you have a program that, when run, calculates the digits of pi. The program itself may be only a few tens of kilobytes, but it may allocate fifty megs or so as a holding area for calculations.
Or, an even more basic example:
while( true )
{
fork();
}
Compile it, and the executable is tiny. Run it, and it will quickly eat every bit of RAM in sight. With the loading of files, creating of data structures, caching of results, etc., it's unusual to find a program that doesn't use significantly more memory than is required to fit the executable alone.
Please, smoke less crack and get your act together.
You want the truthiness? You can't handle the truthiness!
>The first browsers were GUIs (Mosaic).
The first HTTP/HTML browsers were GUI-driven, yes. But I would point out that if you define "web browser" as an application that lets you publish and browse ONLINE internet content, the first "web browser" was Gopher. Gopher was text based and released a good two years before Mosaic.
For a time, gopher was much more stable, usable, and popular than HTTP/HTML.
Ah... That reminds me of the days before AOL connected to the internet. Makes me all weepy eyed.
Considering that the whole thing is being wrapped up in a GTK component, it sounds like we can expect Minimo to work on regular desktops as well. The question, then, is whether you're more interested in speed and simplicity or features and flexibility.
Chances are, most desktop users are going to prefer the latter. But if you're trying to cobble together some older hardware, it might be an option for you. Speaking of which, does anyone know of a distro targeted specifically towards older machines? You know, lots of legacy hardware support, smaller window managers like FVWM and Fluxbox.
You want the truthiness? You can't handle the truthiness!
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!
Even Firefox falls down in the responsiveness category -- UI actions still sometimes get blocked while pages are loading etc.
That has nothing to do with inherent performance of XUL, that has to do with the fact that the UI runs in the same thread as the rendering engine.
The scrolling requirement is not the hard part. When Opera came out with a mobile platform "Small Screen" version of their browser, Daniel Glazman responded by developing a simple Javascript bookmarklet for Netscape and Mozilla browsers called "PDAize that will turn almost any web page into a PDA-size version of itself, eliminating the need to scroll horizontally. It was simply a matter of applying a new stylesheet, and using Javascript to resize images. Check it out, it's pretty nifty.
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
90% of the changes for Minimo have been made to the core engine used by the desktop Mozilla as well. The remaining changes involve things like ifdef-ing out XUL support. Desktop Mozilla's footprint has benefited quite a bit from this project.
Except for Opera's small-screen rendering sucks, at least for general use for me. When you turn it on, it strips out almost everything and shrinks imagines down to little thumbnails. Fine if you're on a phone.
I much prefer the way NetFront handles it, on the Zaurus, PalmOS and PocketPC. Unlike Opera, you don't loose any content- it just makes it fit on the page so you don't have to scroll left and right. Check it out.
Minimo has a CSS that does something similar. For instance, go to this site, bookmark the "PDAize" bookmarklet, and then try it out on Slashdot or some other page. In essence, this is what Minimo is- it's just Mozilla built for Linux/ARM with a new browser-wide style sheet.
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).