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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."
Expect to see large parts of the Internet go down as slashdotters everywhere spontaneously combust due to an inability to reconcile two opposing knee-jerk reactions.
Umm.. this chart is in bytes, right? Right?!
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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Also repoted by CNet yesterday
You don't know the rest of the quote, do you? (This is an IRC conversation, and the rest is a reply to the first part) It reads: "Well, you can still get one from a strange country..."
Still, yours is pretty funny too.
Now, if I could just not try to FP stuff, or at least remember to check post anon...
Also on many other news sources.
There is also more info about the nice little Minimo project (to produce a Gecko-based browser with a tiny footprint).
Joe Llywelyn Griffith Blakesley
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If you fork, you have to pay developers. If you invest and make the Mozilla Foundation (works for other OSS organisations too) see what you need and rally to your cause, you get them to develop for you .
Well, sort of. Check out this article at News.com
It comes as no suprise since Nokia's strategy has clearly been one of standardization.
And what better way to standardized than to support an open source project?
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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...
That's no worse than not giving money and taking the product, which they could also do. As long as Mozilla is getting a fair deal in return for adding the features Nokia wants, I don't see a problem with it.
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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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Even though Nokia is widely known as a mobile phone manufacturer they do have other products as well. Their plans to incorporate Mozilla into their DVB products (the Mediamaster product line) as the web browser component have been public for a couple of years now.
as you can see heise.de which is very reliable posted this story yesterday.
Nokia wants to use Minimo in their smartphones.
...unless that's new. Opera didn't come with my 3650 phone.
You have to buy Opera for a Symbian OS phone like mine (Series 60) but it is very nice. It's one of the best browsers available that I have seen.
I would have been MUCH happier if there was something loaded in the thing when I got it... which may be the thoughts Nokia is having. If they included a sweet little browser based on Firefox, it would really round out the apps in the phones of this class... actually, I think it was a mistake not to include a decent browser in the thing in the first place.
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1) Hire new developers to learn the mozilla code and make the changes, then release them to the public (since it is GPL)
2) Hire existing mozilla developers to work for Nokia to make the changes
3) Contract with the existing developers to get what they want done.
3) is the perfectly logical choice. 1) involves a lot of start-up time. 1) and 2) involve a commitment by Nokia to keep those people on the payroll or severance if they don't work out. In 3) Nokia just drops the contract if it doesn't get the results it wants.
Firefox is 4.7 MB (actually with the latest nightlies, there was yet another size decease to 4.4 MB) and Opera is 3.4 MB.
Inspired by this article, I just downloaded Opera for my #2 computer (Debian Sid, w/ 96MB of RAM, somewhat taxed already by other services). The overall experience is quite a bit snappier than with Firefox 0.8. Firefox seems to choke on memory quite a bit more than Opera, even when I have image display enabled on Opera, and disabled on firefox. The playing fields is level in the sense that I'm running Ion3 display manager (which rocks BTW, all resource-starved should check it out ASAP!).
The memory footprints as reported by 'top' don't appear all that different - both have 20MB resident (firefox a bit more), Opera has 22MB shared and Firefox has 29MB (well, that's 8MB difference).
OTOH, on my main machine with abundant ram and other resource, I would never use a non-OSS browser. There it's Firefox all the way.
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Companies like Nokia, Intel etc have a fairly independent investment (or venture capital) fund that makes investments in a very broad portfolio of companies. They spread their bets so that whichever horse wins, they win. Its called the spray and pray strategy. As a result, they will frequently make competing investments.
The interesting thing is that just because they invest in a company does not mean that the business units interact with those startups.
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.
Do you really think Firefox is popular because it's bundled with an OS hardly any end-users use?
Also, Opera is not available for only one Nokia phone. It's available for Symbian Series 60 phones, and there are more than one Nokia phone based on that, as well as phones by other manufacturers.
Your list of "bundles and browsers" is basically seriously flawed, and your entire post falls apart. Firefox does not rely on eComStation to survive, and Opera does not rely only on Nokia.
So 7.51 being one of the last Opera versions unless it gets on eComStation(!) is pure nonsense and wishful thinking on your part. Why would Opera go away when its user base is growing and they are making more and more money?
Your post sounds a lot like a karma whorish post with some vague points that make sense unless you know a lot about this, in which case, it just sounds like nonsense.
Unfortunately, you managed to fool a few moderators...
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Mozilla is not bloated code - everything in there does something. Bloat refers to useless code.