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Mozilla Heading to Mobiles
mu22le writes "CNET News.com has an interview with Doug Turner, the project leader of Minimo, the version of Mozilla for small devices. The article (also commented upon at mozillazine) roams from the challenges a small devices browser presents to the competition with Opera for Mobile. Brace yourself for the forthcoming Minimo 0.3, due in January."
Or some other aptly named mini-version of Thunderbird for a handheld. I care much more about being able to synching my mail and calendar to my PDA via a bluetooth or wifi connection than I do about browsing the web. And enough with HotSynch already - now that these toys are wifi enabled, let's use regular file transfer methods and regular mail protocols to transfer this information - as if it were a hand sized laptop...
You gotta make something explode to really understand it...examine all those tiny particles while they're still on fire.
The biggest problem with using the sidekick on non-mobile pages is how much longer rendering/downloading takes for sites heavy with ads. The proxies should be filtering these out. Its not like anyone is losing money, as they're next to impossible to read on my tiny screen and if the mobile people think people are buying stuff from banners ads on mobile devices, then they're just fooling themselves.
Only thing I can view on my phone are sites that support the WAP... which sucks, considering many sites (/., even? If there is, I haven't found it) don't have one.
I am the maverick of Slashdot
firefox takes 133 MB of RAM? What is wrong with your computer? On this windows machine here at school it takes 23MB. And it takes even less on my Linux boxen at home. You must have installed some pretty heavy extensions and startup up some pretty crazy plugins to get it to use that much RAM.
The GeekNights podcast is going strong. Listen!
Well, OSS is essentially a "race to the bottom" to see who can devalue the software market the most. Even a superior "non-free" (as in beer) version cannot survive since most people will choose the free version to save a few bucks. Others will simply pirate the non-free version since the free version has established (in their minds) that the cost for such type of software should be zero.
After since these Mozilla folks can give it away for free, why shouldn't the Opera folks? It doesn't matter that the pay version may be better. It is simply a race to the bottom and frequently results in cheap "free" copies ruining the chance for quality comercial software.
"Ooooh, it doesn't work for me, I can't be bothered to read the fricking docs and figure out how to make it work, it's trash and you shouldn't use it.. "
feh. stuff.
In theory porting a Win32 app to CE should be fairly straightforward since much of the API is similar. In theory. But in practice anyone faced with porting Moz to CE would probably ground down by hundreds of little issues - porting NSPR, libjpg, libpng etc and other dependent libs first, flags and APIs not defined, compiler problems, linker problems, resource file problems, configuration issues, memory consumption, footprint, bloat etc.
After all that and after putting a simple embedded app front-end on it. You have a big browser running in a small client.
You then have to work on getting it to produce semi acceptable output. Only part of the problem with Pocket IE, or Netfront is that their rendering & layout is very sucky. The other part is that they have a tiny amount of real estate to work with so it sucks even more.
Hopefully Minimo would be a better layout engine, but it would still have to squash pages down to fit the PDA. So it is essential that it has decent stylesheets that did a good job of scaling images and text down to the fit the display. And there would be extra brownie points if the screen could be rotated to work in landscape mode even on older devices.
Not many. The two ones are Thunderhawk (a server based compression with a client) and Access Netfront (Javascript, JVM, CSS). Netfront is in my opinion the best one on the Windows Mobile platform.
Netfront is also used as the engine behind the browser supplied with Palm OS.
Can you expand on what you did to cause the user account or computer to basicly be wiped and started from scratch?
In the few years I have used Mozilla I have never had any problems like that and I am currious as to what you have done differnet?
(About the only problem I have had is that it seems to randomly crash after I have had it open for more than a week, older versions being worse than than the newer versions)
I use open source software where I feel it's the right tool for the job, I do not (can not) code. The bottom line is, as the developers' "customer" it is their job to make the software usable for their customers.
Backup not found: (A)bort (R)etry (P)anic
Either quit bitching or MAKE THE APP SUPPORT it.
You presume that most people using Open Source application $X are also skilled enough programmers that they could implement any desired missing features themselves, given the inclination. That has the mark of a self-fulfilling prophecy to me -- if non-developers are made to feel unwelcome, then only developers will bother using Open Source projects.
Those who can, do. Those who can't, ask those who can nicely to consider adding the features you want for you. If you can prove your idea is good, someone will be willing to help.
Gecko's recent support for per-site stylesheets could go quite a long way in improving the readability for specific sites.
How do you run OmniWeb on a Zaurus?
-- Oh Well