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Lead Mozilla Developer Talks Windows CE

Posted by Zonk on from the tiny-dinosaur dept.

An anonymous reader writes "The Lead Developer of the Minimo (Mini Mozilla) project, Doug Turner, has ported Minimo over to the Windows CE platform. He discusses this new version of the lightweight edition of Mozilla in a newsgroup posting." From the post: "Currently, I am building against the Pocket PC 2003 SDK. We may want to adjust this at some point, but I thought it would be acceptable place to start. The binary is 3.8MB compressed not including security. To run the build I have, you need about 5mb of memory to display www.google.com."

27 comments

  1. 5 megs to display google.com ? by moro_666 · · Score: 5, Insightful

    "To run the build I have, you need about 5mb of memory to display www.google.com."

    and can someone remember who was the one who said that 64kb is enough for everything ?

    i remember when i used to play around with an Elektronika computer which was built in USSR, it the same massive 64kb of ram and only a floppy drive ....

    everything that was supposed to work, worked.

    ofcourse .. the www wasn't invented just yet ... not even mentioning windows or any browsers ...

    argh these good old days ...

    anyway ... there must be something wrong both with platform and the browser if the simplest page on the net need 5mb to render itself :(

    --

    I'd tell you the chances of this story being a dupe, but you wouldn't like it.
    1. Re:5 megs to display google.com ? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Insightful
      and can someone remember who was the one who said that 64kb is enough for everything ?

      Who? The only quote I know is about 640 KB, and it's not from any Mozilla developer, but rather from Bill Gates. I don't know how that could have as much effect as you wish.

      anyway ... there must be something wrong both with platform and the browser if the simplest page on the net need 5mb to render itself :(

      Considering the browser needs to support all those details from the standards, I wouldn't expect it to have a memory footprint of a couple kilobytes. Maybe the browser will get lighter as the code is refined. Also, it's not like because it consumed 5 MB for Google a substantially bigger page will need substantially more memory.

    2. Re:5 megs to display google.com ? by Marxist+Hacker+42 · · Score: 4, Informative

      5MB isn't much for a WinCE app to use while running- my GPS map browser uses about that much, as does Windows Media. HOWEVER- his EXE size seems a bit large to me (3.8 MB) as Pocket IE on Wince is only 18k for the exe- though I think it has lots of DLLs.

      --
      SJW: a person who perceives an injustice, and while correcting it, commits a greater injustice.
    3. Re:5 megs to display google.com ? by mibus · · Score: 1

      "To run the build I have, you need about 5mb of memory to display www.google.com."

      anyway ... there must be something wrong both with platform and the browser if the simplest page on the net need 5mb to render itself :(

      He's only just started, give a fella a chance! :)

    4. Re:5 megs to display google.com ? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0
      i remember when i used to play around with an Elektronika computer which was built in USSR, it the same massive 64kb of ram and only a floppy drive ....
      Oh, geez. Let the "In Soviet Russia..." jokes begin...
    5. Re:5 megs to display google.com ? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      And nothing on your old computer would do anything modern. At best you could run lynx. Think about it, there's a bit of difference between the functionality of Mozilla and Lynx.

      And the fact that things posted without any thought whatsoever get posted to a +5 Insightful is why I've given up on the Slashdot community.

    6. Re:5 megs to display google.com ? by damiam · · Score: 3, Interesting

      IE6 under Windows 2k3 is only 90k. It really is nothing more than a shell around a bunch of dlls.

      --
      It's hard to be religious when certain people are never incinerated by bolts of lightning.
    7. Re:5 megs to display google.com ? by eno2001 · · Score: 1

      In soviet Russia, computer built You SSR?

      --
      -"...bad old ideas look confusingly fresh when they are packaged as technology" - Jaron Lanier (Digital Maoism on Edge.o
  2. Posted by Zonk on Thursday February 17, @07:41AM by keeleysam · · Score: 2, Funny

    from the dept.

    So I guess this will ahve to be duped later with a departmant tag???

    Correct me if I'm wrong.

    --
    Nothing for you to see here, Please move along.
  3. Options by opposume · · Score: 2, Insightful

    Options are key in continuing the advance of the handheld environment. I think it's great that they're porting "mozilla" over. I look forward to using it.

    --
    I haven't lost my mind. It's backed up on disk somewhere.
  4. Needs to be smaller, but without security!? by solafide · · Score: 4, Insightful
    That seems a little unusual for a browser that prides itself on security to drop it in a minimum build, even if that just means no SSL.

    It is still commendable that it is being made smaller - that is its main disadvantage.

    1. Re:Needs to be smaller, but without security!? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0
      1. browsers can't pride themselves
      2. Opera offers a superset of minimo's features in less than 1/8th the size
  5. Re:Posted by Zonk on Thursday February 17, @07:41A by reed · · Score: 1

    No, "" is just the minimally sized dept. name :)

  6. Re:Posted by Zonk on Thursday February 17, @07:41A by marcello_dl · · Score: 1

    It might as well be a joke, a zero length department for a project to cram a browser in the least possible memory. Or am I overrating ./ editors? :)

    BTW, about correcting you if you're wrong, I usually say "have", not "ahve", but then, I'm no native english speaker :P

    --
    ---- MISSING MISCELLANEOUS DATA SEGMENT --- [sigdash] trolololol
  7. Minimo lead developer by asa · · Score: 4, Informative

    Doug Turner is the lead developer for the Minimo project at Mozilla. This project has a focus on small consumer devices and so this news of a WindowsCE port is very exciting.

    --Asa

    1. Re:Minimo lead developer by khanyisa · · Score: 2, Informative

      Asa is trying to say politely that Doug Turner isn't the lead developer for the whole Mozilla project, as the slashdot summary says. Please fix it up :-)

  8. Now all we need to do is disable JavaScript! by kriston · · Score: 2, Interesting

    One of the two things that a large ISP didn't like about Mozilla was the fact that it required 18 megabytes of memory just to run the Gecko engine so they stuck with their own renderer for "rich text" email and other UI elements.

    The second thing they didn't like was the total inability to remove JavaScript from the product. JavaScript is (evidently) required to render HTML pages by Gecko.

    I guess one out of two ain't bad.

    --

    Kriston

    1. Re:Now all we need to do is disable JavaScript! by OldMiner · · Score: 4, Informative

      The entire user interface of Mozilla is defined by XUL, a markup language. But XUL only says "create a menu and add these menuitems". It does not implement any program logic, for, say, what to do when a menuitem is clicked. All actual behavior has to be implemented via Javascript. So it's not so much Gecko that needs Javascript but that the UI of Mozilla does. And that includes such things as pop-up menus when you right click.

      --
      You like splinters in your crotch? -Jon Caldara
    2. Re:Now all we need to do is disable JavaScript! by R.Mo_Robert · · Score: 1

      Is this certain large ISP AOL? If so, I doubt they'd care about memory usage anymore, if--as you mention--that's even an issue now. (They definitely don't care about the size of the program, either.) But what benefit would they get from removing JavaScript? It's not like you can't disable it (or even just a certain few capabilities of it), and it can't be too much of a tax ... especially since they'd need it for a ton of websites anyway, so removing it wouldn't make any sense. I can understand not wanting it in, say, e-mail, but it's safe to say that they'll need it for Web sites.

      --
      R.Mo
    3. Re:Now all we need to do is disable JavaScript! by damiam · · Score: 3, Informative

      You can disable Javascript in Gecko quite easily. The Mozilla interface itself requires it, but it can be disabled in the frame that shows the actual page.

      --
      It's hard to be religious when certain people are never incinerated by bolts of lightning.
    4. Re:Now all we need to do is disable JavaScript! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      hmmm - when was the last time AOL wasn't concerned about memory usage? what other company tries to keep 8 year old machines active in the online environment? how well does your software run on win98 with 32MB of memory

    5. Re:Now all we need to do is disable JavaScript! by kriston · · Score: 1

      THe disabling of JavaScript would have made it possible to use Gecko to render HTML in things like instant messages and email. Without this possibility you'd need to filter every conceivable security exploit on the server-side. The solution is to not use Gecko (oh well).

      --

      Kriston

  9. smaller 1x browser? by icepick72 · · Score: 4, Interesting


    An interesting item I ran into a while ago is the 1X browser: it fits on a floppy, is very small yet surprisingly functional and fast, however it requires payment (trial version available from the site). I think it works only in Windows -- I can't find any info about it being ported to CE.

    1. Re:smaller 1x browser? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Off by One is even smaller! But it lacks some functionality.

    2. Re:smaller 1x browser? by bhtooefr · · Score: 1

      One word: Dillo.

      Unfortunately, DilloWin is about dead...

  10. Where? by zoloto · · Score: 1

    Where is this project? I'll keep it alive! I love the dillo project, but have never heard of it for windows? Pray tell...do you have a URL you can point me to? email me at @gmail.com if you have info!

    1. Re:Where? by bhtooefr · · Score: 1

      http://dillo-win.sourceforge.jp/index.en.html is the site, and http://sourceforge.jp/projects/dillo-win is the project page.

      Last update was in 2003.

      I'm also e-mailing this post to you.