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MiniMo(zilla) Running on Windows Mobile
webgrappa writes "If you (yes, yes, you that like OpenSource but use Win all the time) own a Windows Mobile Device, in a near future you'll trash Pocket IE and NetFront. MozillaZine has photos of MiniMo running on Windows Mobile Device."
Come on, when will this be ported to Palm OS? I'm currently using NetFront on my Clie, and while it renders pages pretty great, it's slow. Very slow.
So, when? Because Minimo on a Palm would be very nice.
"Your effort to remain what you are is what limits you."
I just wish they'd distribute Firefox instead of Mozilla -- it makes a noticable difference on the desktop, and I'd imagine an even more sizeable one on a cellphone. Although I just recently saw a DivX movie on a friend's system, so maybe they're powerful enough to tolerate a little bloat.
Try not. Do or do not, there is no try.
-- Dr. Spock, stardate 2822-3.
Since Minimo seems to require a relatively small amount of memory (compared to Mozilla or Firefox), has anyone ever considered porting it back to the desktop so it can be used as a very lightweight browser on desktop?
On the topic of those who profess to love OSS and free software but do not use it, who has a link to the slashdot usage statistics?
I remember seeing only about 20% mozilla and 80% IE on windows or something for a slashdotting. Pretty disgraceful (not all of that can be "we have to use it at work").
Links would be nice for a little sub-discussion of the issue (issue which was brought up in the topic for those "off topic" happy mods).
cheers.
Thank god. The crappy html browser in the windows smartphone platform (bastardized internet explorer) was the only thing holding me back from getting one of the smartphones out there today. Symbian is still a hot contender but most symbian phones are way too bulky for my use. For some reason the windows smartphones seem to be much slimmer. Sendo has a nice proprietary smartphone setup with their Sendo X but they still haven't worked all the bugs out. The ability to use a "real" browser with a smartphone just tipped the scales, goodbye Ericsson P910!
Link to minimo project
--Fairfax Underground: Where Fairfax County comes out to play
It just doesn't render very good. I wrote this post using it on my Axim x50v.
I haven't looked into this, but does it have a Playstation 2 port? Running netfront is ok, but it would be nice to have mozilla on a PS2.
Hell, I might be willing to help with the port -- you never know when I'll need it for PSP too. hah
I'm surprised at how quickly a port was done from Familar Linux to WinCE/WM2003. I have a Dell Axim X5 from a few years back. When extracted, the current version is about 15MB, 9MB going for winembed.exe. From what I've heard, users running WM2003SE have more problems than those you have slightly older devices. It seems like Minimo isn't using any windows mobile or ce.net specific APIs. The top bar is forced to the bottom of the screen, the bottom bar doesn't exist and the input toggle is forced onto the top bar. This caused a conflict with ICBar and will probably cause conflicts with similar ICBar based UI customization programs.
Forms and links don't work yet, but it is almost akward seeing a website rendered just as it would be on a full browser, especially after suffering through Pocket IE.
It looks good on the ipaq linux conversions.
And the change to filesystem methodology for Palms is a good thing WHY?
The old database-style techniques were far more efficient. When PalmOne moved to a filesystem-based architecture with the Treo 650, users found that N megs of RAM in the new device was equivalent to N/2 megs of RAM in the old device.
PalmOS has always been more efficient and far better than Windows Mobile for any embedded device. PalmOS devices have historically been more usable despite 1/10 the processing power of a WinCE device thanks to the fact that PalmOS was designed from the ground up for mobile devices, while WinCE and its bastard brethren are a horrendous hack.
Unfortunately, PalmOS 5.x is a step backwards. POS 5.x runs on significantly faster hardware than OS4, with practically no benefits in 95% of situations. It's still a hell of a lot better than any mobile version of Windows.
retrorocket.o not found, launch anyway?
When will there be a Zaurus port of this? I'm aware of only one such project, but thus far I've been unable to get Firefox to run on the standard Sharp ROM. I tried OpenZaurus but it was buggy. It certainly would be nice to be able to run Firefox on the many Linux-based handhelds.
So I went to the extra trouble of installing recent builds of GPE and OPIE (based on Familiar 0.8) on an iPaq h5450 I got from work. I ran Minimo under GPE, but didn't find it all that useful. It didn't even have bookmarks, so I'd have to type in my sites by hand each time. The konqueror-based browser under opie was much nicer.
I got my greatest kick from installing a 1GB CF card in it and running debian-ARM off of it using chroot. I could run mozilla on a 640x480 vnc virtual framebuffer, displayed using OPIE's nice VNC client keypebble in 1/2 scale full screen mode. It was readable, fully functional (albeit a bit slow) and the scrollbars were a nice small size (I don't know why all of the programs in GPE and OPIE need such large scrollbars that take up, like, 5-10% of the meager screen real estate). Unfortunately, keypebble would consume all of the CPU time on screen refreshes, so this wasn't very good for battery life.
Anyway, the touchscreen crapped out soon thereafter, which means I can't get past the calibration screen under WinCE or OPIE, so now I'm pretty much stuck with GPE (which uses xstroke and isn't as picky as the iPaq digitizer calibration hardware, I guess). But it's still kinda painful to try to push buttons since all my strokes are skewed a bit, no matter how I calibrate the screen now.
So I'm pretty much back to reading pages with Plucker and occasionally Avantgo on my aging Visor Pro, even though it's starting to lose lines on its greyscale screen and the button don't register half the time unless I stroke them a certain way. For my part, I'm planning on holding out until someone offers a cameraless GSM Treo 650 (so I can use it at work - does anyone know if it's straightforward enough to just open it up and remove it yourself?). From there, I'd hope I could move straight to a Zaurus-phone in a few years, if I could afford to have one knocking around in my pockets.
It's nice that Minimo is progressing, but I'd much rather see a full firefox with a slimmed UI, especially since the devices are powerful enough to support this already.
Try: http://park15.wakwak.com/~ftx/
I've been using it for about 2 years... tabbed browsing, text sizing, 'simply view' mode (no side scrolling or useless formatting), and the app is a mere 73K. Nice.
If you look you'll see that the Google logo is at 1:1 resolution.
That's because the gecko renderer doesn't support "true" zoom of text + images (yet), so until that's fixed it'll only be useful if you've got a nice big screen (and/or you like to scroll). Of course the Opera engine has been able to do this for years..
The relevant mozilla bug is https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=4821
(copy & paste to your browser)
I'm a perfectionist but I'm trying to cut back.