Slashdot Mirror
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.
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.
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.