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."

Comments

Eventual PPC port?

[SIGALRM]

"We can be ported to many platforms that Opera can't," he said. "Mozilla has been developed to work on every flavor of Unix and every type of processor, chip or widget set."

Exciting project. I hope they eventually port Minimo to the Pocket PC; I have an iPAQ 6315 PPC Phone Edition and happily abandoned Pocket IE in favor of the far superior Thunderhawk browser. However, Thunderhawk is subscription-based ($49.95/yr), so I'd be very interested in a Mozilla port for my PPC.

Re:Eventual PPC port?

[Kris_J]

I tried Thunderhawk yesterday and it was completely unreadable, even the UI. As such, I couldn't find any options that appeared to affect the rendering engine in order to fix it.

Palm in the future?

[ISEENOEVIL]

Blazer, the browser that comes installed with the Treo 650 smartphones, is usable, but I have had some stability issues with it and there are a few quirks here and there. Having the option of a Mozilla based browser on something like the 650 would be a blessing, especially considering the costs of many Palm applications.

This is my first Palm, and to get it to do the really interesting things you have to spend 29.95 on this application, 39.95 on that, etc. After spending as much money on a Smartphone, I am hesitant to shell out more money for expensive applications. Heck, I am unwillingly. (Lets not mention bluetooth accessories)

The CNET interview makes it sound like the Minimo team knows how to make a worthwhile portable browser that I would immediately jump to. Shrinking the unimportant images, zooming in and out quickly on a page, and providing better support for Javascript and frames can only be steps in the right direction for small browsers.

I didn't see Palm mentioned in the article, so its only a hope. If this wouldn't work on Palm based devices, I wonder if Palms latest linux initiative rumblings would eventually lead to compatibility down the road? Tabbed browsing on the crisp 650 display would be nice.

Not there yet

[m50d]

I hate to say this, but at the moment minimo is nowhere near being able to compete with opera. Opera is really, really nice on embedded devices, and I can't see it being replaced on any but the cheapest devices any time soon.

a light browser

[lubricated]

I need this for my desktop. Firefox is pretty heavyweight. Currently it takes 133MB of ram. If they reduce this by half I can put it on smaller computers.

Dandy, but...

[Universal Nerd]

...how about finishing roaming profile support?

Come on folks, it was built into Netscape 4.7, why is it so hard to build it into Firefox and the Suite? ...sigh...

Small Browser Content

[Big_Al_B]

Even the slickest small, embedded browsers will struggle in the marketplace until more sites support small-screen browsable content.

Sites with scheduling content (movie times, game schedules etc.) would be ideal, but there's not enough of that out there to drive the popularity of these browsers up yet.

I'm sure the day will come though...

Re:Will it work on cell phones?

[kmmatthews]

Check this out http://www.fizzl.net/projects/sdwap.php.. Very nicely done, it makes slashdot readable on devices that support WAP.

Got to feel sorry for the guys at Opera

[Realistic_Dragon]

First they get their market on the desktop eaten so they make an excellent mobile product that's worth the money. Now they are facing (in a decade or so when Mozilla finishes development... they aren't the speediest at new products) getting that market wiped out too. I don't mind seeing it happen to companies like Microsoft but it seems a little hard on Opera who have this far been nothing but nice*.

So, whilst I am looking forward to seeing what Moilla can do, I wish the Opera guys all the best and hope that the money they made in the mobile market lets them develop something spectacular to keep them going until the commodity stuff catches up again :o)

*Do you see any lawsuits? Threats? Whining? Almost unbelievable in this day and age.

Define port

[slapout]

We can be ported to many platforms that Opera can't

Opera has been ported to Linux, cell phones, PDAs and embedded devices. What platform is he refering to when he says Opera can't be ported to it?

CSS for handhelds

[bjdevil66]

I've set up pages using the @media rules for handhelds in order to alter the layout of pages for these devices. However, they don't work in the handhelds I tested (at least that was the case months back). Hopefully this browser will work with these media rules...

Re:banner ads

[Unknown Lamer]

Opera has a proxy service that resizes images and stuff to make web pages on mobile devices faster to download.

When you buy Opera (at least for a Series60 Nokia phone) you get a 90 trial. It is well worth subscribing to.