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

Wow, only 64 MB of RAM?

[Anonymous Coward]

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?

Re:Wow, only 64 MB of RAM?

[alecf]

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.

Re:Wow, only 64 MB of RAM?

[fikx]

Of course....the internet has more stuff now. It used to fit in 400K, but now it's so big, you need at least 64M to hold it all...

And all the viruses make it worse...I don't know how many times I've had to re-install the internet on my PC...

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!

Brilliant Idea

[CrosseyedPainless]

Hey! Let's just crosspost everything from OSNews, and like, not even change the titles much. Oh, wait!!! It's been done! Nevermind.

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

For regular desktops?

[AtariAmarok]

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?

Re:Whatever

[geomon]

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.

Qtopia port?

[j0hndoe]

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.

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...

According to the Simpsons, it's not possible

[Deraj DeZine]

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.

Isn't 64M still too big?

[dharma21]

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?

Fat Bastard

[proudlyindian]

In other news Mozilla's new name will be Fat Bastard

Striving to be common ...

yes

[hak1du]

... 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.