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.
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 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.
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.
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?
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.