Lead Mozilla Developer Talks Windows CE

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."

Comments

5 megs to display google.com ?

[moro_666]

"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 :(

Re:5 megs to display google.com ?

[Marxist Hacker 42]

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.

Re:5 megs to display google.com ?

[damiam]

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

Needs to be smaller, but without security!?

[solafide]

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.

Minimo lead developer

[asa]

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

Re:Now all we need to do is disable JavaScript!

[OldMiner]

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.

smaller 1x browser?

[icepick72]

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.

Re:Now all we need to do is disable JavaScript!

[damiam]

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.