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!

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.

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.

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: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.

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).