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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.
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?
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!
Hey! Let's just crosspost everything from OSNews, and like, not even change the titles much. Oh, wait!!! It's been done! Nevermind.
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)
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.
If you read the article, they are talking about rendering a fully compliant webpage. They did mention Opera and PocketIE. Both failed to render at 32MB. From the article:
"We have run the same tests using Opera and Pocket IE on 32MB device form factors, and neither can make it though the page load test based on their lack of browser content and standards support, or they just simply run out of memory trying to display the pages."
I don't think they are talking about the size of the binary distribution, but the size of all the components loaded into RAM and rendering compliant webpages.
"Rocky Rococo, at your cervix!"
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.
...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.
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?
In other news Mozilla's new name will be Fat Bastard
...
Striving to be common
Striving to be common...
Check out Konq-E. (Konquereor Embedded) It is stripped down Konq that runs against Qt and some stub KDE classes. Works really well! It renders web pages better than Moz, and for the performce/space/features it can't be beat, except for a few co mmercial offerings.. Oh yeah, did i mention full JAVASCRIPT? And it is based off of Konquerer 3.2!
Slashdot's rate-of-post filter: Preventing you from posting too many great ideas at once.
... 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.
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).
I love to break it to people when they just don't get it.
Firefox is only about an 8 MB download, and Mozilla is around 12-16. Sure, they're both bigger than Opera, but the size of the executable says nothing about how much memory it will use while running.
Okay, say you have a program that, when run, calculates the digits of pi. The program itself may be only a few tens of kilobytes, but it may allocate fifty megs or so as a holding area for calculations.
Or, an even more basic example:
while( true )
{
fork();
}
Compile it, and the executable is tiny. Run it, and it will quickly eat every bit of RAM in sight. With the loading of files, creating of data structures, caching of results, etc., it's unusual to find a program that doesn't use significantly more memory than is required to fit the executable alone.
Please, smoke less crack and get your act together.
You want the truthiness? You can't handle the truthiness!