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?

[Herr_Nightingale]

I've been following the project for a while now, and Pocket PC is not even on the roadmap; Minimo is strictly *nix. Also, it requires a gigantic chunk of memory (min. 32MB) to run, and it's far from fast. There is absolutely no comparison to Opera. None.
Mobile Opera is tiny (like 200k!!) and super-efficient, but only runs on smartphones right now.
It looks like we have a chance of seeing Opera on the iPaq sooner than Minimo, even though Opera too doesn't care much for Pocket PC.

In the meantime, try NetFront 3.1 - it's sweet. But it doesn't work on 2003SE in landscape mode.

I'd use it if...

[teiresias]

Now if I just use one of my micro mobile devices for browsing the web...

My cellphone, my pda, hell probably my digital camera can probably get on the Internet. But if you think I'm browsing webpages on that kind of screen your nuts.

My hats off Doug Turner and to the guys programming Minimo but I just don't browse the web on my micro devices. I use them for their other features.

Minimo is fine and good, but how about "Tweety?"

[Chillybott]

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...

banner ads

[gad_zuki!]

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.

Re:How long before Opera starts enforcing patents?

[kmmatthews]

Allow me to be the first to say:
You, sir, are an ass monkey.

Minimo!

[matt4077]

Stop humping the laser!

To summarize parent,

[kmmatthews]

"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.. "