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Nokia Invested In Mozilla?
Pine UK writes "The Register, is reporting that Nokia has invested in the Mozilla Foundation. This news should come as a shock to Opera, who in recent times have had a very large market share in the area of portable device browsers. Opera has also been the browser choice for Nokia, who ship it with all their Symbian 'smartphones.' Nokia have not yet confirmed nor denied their investment in Mozilla."
I always found Opera fast, and much lighter than Mozilla. But, with the advent of Firefox, I'd have to say theres not much reason to stick with Opera. I just don't see very many advantages (plus, Firefox is open source).
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Why invest and not just take the source and fork Mozilla for use on their cellphones? I thought this was perfectly legit in the open-source world.
Unless of course the are donatin to the Mozilla foundation for helping develop such an excellent browswer package.
I don't think it would have been a shock or anything. Anyone who thinks they are immune to competition will quickly perish. Obviously opera is a great product for cell phones, but the mozilla guys have been doing consistent work reducing their memory footprint and increasing speed, and with some more focused work they could be as nearly as good as opera. A cash infusion could help them do just that. And Gecko's rendering is at least as good as Opera's.
I loved my first Nokia when a phone was a phone. Now that my phone needs to be a PDA/browser etc. (AKA Smartphone) I'm not interested in any of their current products.
It seems I'm not alone.
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Hmmm...I really wonder how Microsoft will respond to the recent movement in the browser market. Of course they are still market leaders on the desktop but have you ever used their stripped down version of IE on a PocketPC? It's just a joke!
I wonder where Microsoft will turn in the near future since all work on IE seems to be on hold up until Longhorn and their smartphones never really took off. If I were in their shoes I would start acting. I always considered Microsoft as a serious competitor but lately they haven't made any real progress and seem to fall behind in a lot of markets. Not that they will be gone anytime soon but I wonder if they really are asleep or if they are up to something big nobody has thought of yet. This silence is suspicious...
Because firefox doesn't support small-screen rendering.
And Nokia products have....
Small screens!
I've always liked Nokia phones but I wasn't going to get another one because of their stance (and their campaigning) on software patents but if they are investing in Mozilla - I'm really torn.
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Nokia had a TV console some while ago based on Mozilla. There are probably engineers in their group who are familiar with it and know what it is capable of.
Without knowing the size of the investment and circumstances, this could be a non-story. I believe that the Mozilla Foundation is a 501(c)3 now, and as such corporations can donate to them for tax relief--that may be all that's happening here, with a sprinkling of business sense that it's important to keep browser alternatives alive.
Another interesting angle is that Minimo will offer a XUL engine on-board, which means you could develop applications using XUL instead of the Symbian SDK.
Nokia is simply keeping its options open for its phones. They didn't want to back just one browser (Opera) only to possibly see it be run out of business and then Nokia would've been left with no viable option. Strengthening Mozilla helps them not only on the phone platform but it also aggrivates Microsoft in its home industry. Smart move, Nokia. Now work on getting the radiation levels lowered on your products...
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This does make sense to me:
- no licensing costs (fixed costs like this investment you can make up for in volume, but per product licensing costs are a constant drag on profit)
- no need to wait for a port from the browser maker, you can do it yourself, or have the user community do it for you (very few phones have opera ports currently)
- tied into that, user community assistance in general browser development
- the pda opera is not a full browser, minimo is (by full I mean complete css, dom and js support)
- open source (though from a corporate pov this is a tiny benefit)
- better/easier customization than a proprietary product could hope to deliver
- minimo picks up improvements to the mozilla trunk automatically, opera's ports need actual porting effort for updated features (afaik)
- and in the future: possibility of running xul apps remotely on the phone, making developing/offering/selling new features for old phones a doable proposition
Ofcourse, maybe nokia just wants competition in the pda browser market, and opera's steadily climbing marketshare worries them.
- Tabbed browsing - you may use tabs either in graphical or even in text mode.
- Lua scripting - ported from Links-Lua, not from current ELinks code, but
the differences are not so sensitive, I hope.
- HTTP Auth - stable, ported from Elinks
- HTTP Proxy Auth - ported from Elinks, need to be checked.
- Blocking of selected images - my own code
;-). You may block images containing given
substring (of course, it is better to use regexps, but this way is
more portable). Just press '-' to edit the list of blocked patterns.
- Cookies saving - ported from ELinks, now our HTTP-header date parsing is
correct, I hope.
- New options system - inspired by ELinks one, but much more uglier
currently
;-)) Only a few options are implemented through it.
Press 'Ctrl+o' to call options manager.
- Possibility to open new windows instead of new links instances in graphics
mode - new socket is created with name 'glinks' in links dir, instead
of 'links' for text instances, so they can work independently. After
that command 'links -g' works like 'mozilla -remote', simply opening
new instances from currently running one. But it has some limitations -
these new windows will open on the same display as original one...
- Url copying - some code from Ludvik Tezar' patch, but the backend is organized
more cleanly - there are two additional fields in struct graphics_driver -
put_to_clipboard and get_from_clipboard. Only X11 backend is functional
now, as I don't use others
;-)
- Full-text selection - Now we have nearly complete full-text selection -
you may select any part of rendered text (except form controls) and copy
it to clipboard. Clipboard charset is configurable through new options
system (Ctrl+'o').
- Simple printing - It is VERY simple - we make
PDF file (throung pdflib) with text only (just a rectangles instead of images), and
with PDF internal fonts only (don't even try to print non-latin-1 texts!!!) - but we have more-or-less correct layout and
page breakings. Press 'P', and it will ask you for filename to print to.
- Forward history - really, single history list, you can move backward
and forward through it
- Extended and configurable 'toolbar' - there are currently Back, History, Forward, Reload,
Bookmarks, Home and Stop buttons.
'Configurability' means that you can change each button look
(they use pixmaps from special internal system-medium-serif-vari font you
can find in graphics/font dir) and even turn it on or off.
- Configurable 'mini-status' - some useful info in lower right corner of
your window to show how many connections now in 'running' or 'connecting'
state are, and also SSL, Content-Encoding and Images flags.
- Some small but useful improvements - support for "small" and "big" tags,
keybinding ("i") to turn on/off images, possibility to show HTTP
header ("|", as in Elinks), support for compressed content (Content-Encoding
and gzipped local files), configurable support for Accept-Charset and Accept-Language.
- Modularized font subsystem - currently builtin fonts and Unicode
TrueType (through freetype backend) may be used. Font manager is available
(Ctrl+'i') for adding/deleting external (only freetype yet) fonts.
External fonts have the same way into the code - so they are antialiased
as good as builtin
;-)
- Dialogs shadows and borders - Just shadows
;-))
From links-hacked site.Can you spell BLOAT ? I know you want to, c'mon, dont be shy, Lets say it togethet, Mozilla is a BLOATHOG !
Go grab those torrents.
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