Mozilla's Mini-Me

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Posted by michael on Friday May 21, 2004 @05:29AM from the no-sharks-no-lasers dept.

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."

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As long as developers can make their pages fit by Trigun · 2004-05-21 05:31 · Score: 4, Insightful

There's nothing I hate more than having to scroll sideways on a website.
1. Re:As long as developers can make their pages fit by Anonymous Coward · 2004-05-21 07:13 · Score: 2, Insightful
  
  What do you mean, scroll down instead of up?
PocketPC by Merovign · 2004-05-21 05:32 · Score: 4, Insightful

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?
Wow, only 64 MB of RAM? by Anonymous Coward · 2004-05-21 05:33 · Score: 5, Insightful

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?
1. Re:Wow, only 64 MB of RAM? by Pxtl · 2004-05-21 05:37 · Score: 4, Insightful
  
  Good god yes. Sometimes I think back and wonder where the hell all the software went. I browsed the internet with Windows 3.1, trumpet Winsock, and Netscape on my 486 DX/66 that had a screaming 16 megs of ram.
  
  Whenever you look at an old fossil of a computer, remember this: at some point, that was considered so much power that we would never be able to find a use for it all. We can't even blame MS - Linux gear is just as bloated.
2. Re:Wow, only 64 MB of RAM? by Deraj+DeZine · 2004-05-21 06:01 · Score: 3, Insightful
  
  One thing I've noticed is that I've stopped thinking "Wow, this is so much speed/space/power, that I'll never need more than this!" Like when I see huge new hard drives, I now think "400 GB is a lot of space, but I'll still fill it up with legally acquired movies eventually."
  
  I still like to upgrade to newer and faster stuff, but it just doesn't seem as amazing as the first time I got a 500 MB hard drive and could fit an entire encyclopedia into a little metal box.
  
  --
  True story.
3. Re:Wow, only 64 MB of RAM? by alecf · 2004-05-21 06:14 · Score: 5, Insightful
  
  I'm not about to say that Mozilla isn't a resource hog.
  
  However, lets at least take things into perspective. When you browsed the web with 32MB of RAM (hey, so did I) it was with "HTML 1.0" and small images.. remember back when web pages had mostly text, grey backgrounds, and a few pictures here and there?
  
  These days we have:
  - JavaScript - a full fledged interpreted language
  - the DOM - complete read/write live access to the current document's structure
  - CSS, which involves applying complex matching of style to document fragments and formatting of those fragments,
  - new layout concepts like absolute and relative positining, floats, etc
  - vastly more complex layout due to interactions of HTML rules and CSS rules
  - plugins
  - XML
  - support for JPEG, PNG, animated GIFs
  - HTTP 1.1 with reusable connections, pipelining, compression, smarter but more complex caching, and more
  
  And thats the short list. And as much as you might say "that's just fluff! That's not the core of the web" you'd sure be complaining if your web browser didn't support all that.
  
  The web is a lot more complex than it once was. You can't harken back to the days of Mosaic without realizing all the technologies that go into a modern web browser.
4. Re:Wow, only 64 MB of RAM? by FuzzyBad-Mofo · 2004-05-21 06:20 · Score: 2, Insightful
  
  I browsed the internet with Windows 3.1, trumpet Winsock, and Netscape on my 486 DX/66 that had a screaming 16 megs of ram.
  
  So what, I have the capability to browse the Internet with my Commodore 64, RR-Net adaptor, and Contiki OS. However, it's a definate case of, "It's not the quality of his speech, it's the fact the dog speaks at all". Sure, you can access the Internet on a 286/386/C64 but you're probably not going to have niceties like Flash, CSS, Javascript, graphics, etc..
5. Re:Wow, only 64 MB of RAM? by Anonymous Coward · 2004-05-21 06:50 · Score: 1, Insightful
  
  And they flew to the moon with an onboard computer (interruptdriven, multiuser, and very reliable) that is *far* surpassed by an ordinary Texas calculator today. It's quite interesting what you can do with next to nothing :)
6. Re:Wow, only 64 MB of RAM? by Brandybuck · 2004-05-21 08:15 · Score: 2, Insightful
  
  The thing I like about Linux is you can get by using only CLI / text-based software if you want to
  
  I was using OS/2 Warp on a 100MHz Pentium with 16MB RAM. Not command line, but full GUI. And it was responsive and quick. And OS/2's GUI was much more heavyweight than Window 95's...
  
  --
  Don't blame me, I didn't vote for either of them!
7. Re:Wow, only 64 MB of RAM? by Anonymous Coward · 2004-05-21 09:19 · Score: 1, Insightful
  
  However, lets at least take things into perspective. When you browsed the web with 32MB of RAM (hey, so did I) it was with "HTML 1.0" and small images.. remember back when web pages had mostly text, grey backgrounds, and a few pictures here and there?
  
  Just the other week I ran FireFox on an OpenBSD machine with 24MB RAM (and a Pentium MMX 166). It worked fine. It was really incredibly painfully slow, but it worked. (and it looked pretty good too, once it got around to painting the screen)
  
  So no, it wasn't HTML 1.0.
  
  but I don't know if it qualifies for these guy's "64MB" even if it was fast enough, since I've probably got more than 40MB of swap.
Insensitive clod! by Anonymous Coward · 2004-05-21 05:34 · Score: 1, Insightful

My desk computer has 128MB of ram! (Adding another 512MB later today.) Seriously, when did 64MB become the yardstick for compact embedded systems?
For regular desktops? by AtariAmarok · 2004-05-21 05:37 · Score: 5, Insightful

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.
1. Re:For regular desktops? by sunryder · 2004-05-21 06:17 · Score: 2, Insightful
  
  Reducing binary and runtime memory consumption is a great idea, but it's usually going to involve some design tradeoffs. This may mean the product will run slower, or have a slower, less responsive UI.
  
  Computer storage is cheap. My time is not.
2. Re:For regular desktops? by jsebrech · 2004-05-21 06:49 · Score: 2, Insightful
  
  Actually, the trade-off is not on the application UI performance, but on the webpage UI performance (like pageload speed and dhtml/script performance). Firefox has demonstrated that an interpreted UI can perform as well as a native UI (or close enough to not matter), which is why microsoft is moving its UI's entirely to the interpreted xaml for the next windows version. The mozilla UI was a first attempt at doing the interpreted UI, and the project to improve it has basically resulted in firefox (which uses a different UI engine than mozilla proper).
  
  In the article they mention the engine can be embedded, meaning people can make whatever UI they want and wrap it around minimo.
Re:Brilliant Idea by Anonymous Coward · 2004-05-21 05:44 · Score: 1, Insightful

OSNews is a great site that I visit from time to time, but their idea is more or less based on Slashdot's.

Slashdot popularized the format and was meant as a one-stop. Not duplicating the copycats would mean that it's not a one-stop anymore.
Qtopia port? by j0hndoe · 2004-05-21 05:45 · Score: 5, Insightful

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.
Isn't 64M still too big? by dharma21 · 2004-05-21 06:04 · Score: 5, Insightful

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?
Re:why mozilla? by Anonymous Coward · 2004-05-21 06:12 · Score: 1, Insightful

Well, presumably they want not just the browser, but also the email client, newreader, IRC chat, page creator etc.

Also remember that Mozilla is stable and supported with a set API, whereas Firefox is still beta, unsupported and subject to change.
KHTML ? Already used in your Zaurus PDAs ... by phoxix · 2004-05-21 06:16 · Score: 3, Insightful

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
yes by hak1du · 2004-05-21 06:31 · Score: 5, Insightful

... 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.
Re:Contrast with Mosaic circa 1994 by hak1du · 2004-05-21 06:34 · Score: 4, Insightful

HTML4, JavaScript, plug-ins, anti-aliasing, DOM, internationalization, dealing with incorrect HTML and backwards compatibility all make Mozilla as big as it is.

Furthermore, you can get quick release cycles or careful coding, but not both. Most desktop software (Windows, OS X, Gnome, KDE, etc.) is developed and optimized only as much as is needed to make it run on current hardware.

When looking at Mozilla's memory footprint, also keep in mind that most people run it with significant in-memory caching.
Re:Contrast with Mosaic circa 1994 by timeOday · 2004-05-21 07:09 · Score: 3, Insightful

These comparisons of browsers today vs. yesteryear mean nothing, when the Web of today is totally different than it used to be. You can't even make sense of the web with mosaic any more.
Determine the pounds of documentation necessary to specify the set of "web standards" required to comfortably view the Web, now vs. 10 years ago. That includes Javascript, CSS, DHTML, if not flash and Java itself. HTML itself is a mere drop in the bucket!
And with the proliferation of broadband, pages are getting more and more content rich (aka bloated). Sure there were "inline images" back then, but if you were to plot the average number of images per page (or flash apps, or HTTP requests per page, etc) over the past several years, what would you find?
Are programmers really producing bloated and wasteful code? I'd argue the Web itself is more to blame.