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."

Comments

Not to be pessimistic...

[Kiriwas]

... 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.

Contrast with Mosaic circa 1994

[shoppa]

The first graphical browser I ever ran - Mosaic on a VAX circa 1994 - was on a 16 Mbyte machine that supported a few dozen users at a time.

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!

Why not just use LYNX?

[TheTXLibra]

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.

Whatever

[paradigim_shft]

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.

Wow.

[Dizzle]

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?

Plans for other devices?

[Gizzmonic]

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.

Re:Plans for other devices?

[Lispy]

Hey, OWA doesn't even work with IE6. We install Firefox on our OWA-Users systems so that they are finally able to download attachements from the OWA-Server. So much for Microsofts interoperability.

Re:Plans for other devices?

[gilesjuk]

Indeed, all of the weaknesses of Windows on the desktop (registry nightmares, reboots) but with non of the advantages (GUI behaviour is different, different CPU platforms, fixed screen sizes etc..). I only own one since there's less software for the other platforms.

I'd love Mozilla for PocketPC. PIE is a bit dumb and basic.

Why not make it a main browser?

[www.sorehands.com]

If MiniMoe supports most of the web standards, why not make Minicurley^h^h^h^h^h^hmo the primary browser?

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.

why mozilla?

[drmancini]

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

Re:why mozilla?

[jsebrech]

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

Actually, firefox is built around the mozilla engine. It is based on the mozilla trunk, and picks up code changes to the trunk automatically. Mozilla is EXTREMELY modular. Mini-mo takes the kind of approach that was taken to make firefox (strip out stuff you don't need in a browser, simplify the UI, tweak settings for desktop use) to improve performance on PDA's.

It would not have been a benefit to start from the firefox codebase, since most of the firefox work is UI-related, which is radically different in mini-mo.

My laptop has 64 MB RAM!

[BitwizeGHC]

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.

Re:PocketPC

[Milo of Kroton]

Why use it for just PocketPC? I'd like to have a "minimum resources" browser, as long as it can offer most of the features of Firefox. Certainly pop-up blocking and ask before accepting cookies is a must.

mozilla OS

[farkinga]

...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...

Re:First post ?

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:Wow, only 64 MB of RAM?

[pebs]

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.

Yep.. I did the same on a 486/33 w/ 8 MB of RAM :)

We can't even blame MS - Linux gear is just as bloated.

There is still plenty of Linux software that isn't bloated. The thing I like about Linux is you can get by using only CLI / text-based software if you want to, and its reasonable to do so for many tasks. For Windows, you have to load up a heavyweight GUI to do anything.

Does it run x86?

[diegocgteleline.es]

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...

Re:Isn't 64M still too big?

[TeknoHog]

We were using browsers on computers that only had 16M on memory.

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 :)

Meh! 64 Megs

[cpct0]

Yes, another 64 megs comment.

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, .classes included to run your soft.
- 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!

Palm OS browsers

[gearmonger]

Except for the lack of pop-up window handling and some of the "fancier" plug-ins (e.g., Flash), I've been pretty satisfied with the better Palm OS handheld browsers when viewing standards-compliant websites. It's when webmasters start catering their code to IE that screws things up most of the time.

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).

Re:I agree

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Not surprising - it was born from CAB - Crystal Atari Browser which I used to use on a 2.5MB Atari ST. I'm still impressed that these multi-gigahertz, multi-gigabyte modern machines can run so slowly. :)

Re:Wow, only 64 MB of RAM?

[RzUpAnmsCwrds]

I ran Internet Explorer 6 on a system with 64MB of memory and Windows 98 for years. I know that it wasn't being swapped out because I disabled swap (Windows 98 is horrible at memory management).

It supports the vast majority of those technologies.

KHTML also seems to run well. I had it running on my 32MB iPaq at one point.

uhhh....

[ShadowRage]

"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?