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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."
There's nothing I hate more than having to scroll sideways on a website.
I don't suppose they call this a mini-dupe? It is a clone after all!
----
Go canucks, habs, and sens!
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?
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?
... 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.
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!
Hard too believe it's going to be small enough. ;-)
Hey! Let's just crosspost everything from OSNews, and like, not even change the titles much. Oh, wait!!! It's been done! Nevermind.
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.
-The Libra
"Please be patient--The future will begin momentarily."
Embedded *free* browser of choice maybe. Opera still has a rather large development advantage on small screen devices.
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.
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?
-Dizzle
"I most likely AM so interested in myself."
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.
(-1, Raw and Uncut is the only way to read)
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.
Fight Spammers!
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
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
Never underestimate the power of idiots in large groups
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.
While we're at it can someone come up with a way to shrink the Mozilla mascot. I just marvel at the possibilities.
My Shrink: "Delusional."
Me: "I swear, its a 5 inch tall dinosaur living in my glovebox!"
My Shrink: "Sure, Nurse please get this man a tranqil... um.... mint from the special jar."
You teach a child to read and he or her will be able to pass a literacy test. - George W. Bush
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.
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.
N4st0r, trixx0r h0bb1tz0rz! Th3y st0l3 0ur pr3c10uzz!
...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...
?/o
Homer: Umm ... I guess I'll take that one.
Salesman: Well, do you need a paperweight? 'Cause if you buy that machine, that's all you're going to have, an expensive paperweight.
Homer: Well, a paperweight would be nice, but what I really need is a computer. How about that one? [points to a second machine]
Salesman: That technology is three months old. Only suckers buy out-of-date machines. You're not a sucker, are you sir?
Homer: Heavens no!
Salesman: Oh good, because if you were, I'd have to ask you to leave the store.
Homer: I just need something to receive email.
Salesman: [whistles] You'll need a top-of-the-line machine for that. [shows Homer a top-of-the-budget machine] That's the same computer astronauts use to do their taxes.
Homer: I was an astronaut.
Salesman: Of course you were.
True story.
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!
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?
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...
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
In other news Mozilla's new name will be Fat Bastard
...
Striving to be common
Striving to be common...
Minimo would gain a lot of users if they made a Qtopia port.
It starts.
... 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.
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 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 :)
Escher was the first MC and Giger invented the HR department.
Yes, another 64 megs comment.
.classes included to run your soft.
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,
- 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!
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).
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!
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
my blog
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).
"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?
...turn it sideways so you'll be scrolling up and down. :-)
Stop the world; I need to get off.