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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."
http://rebron.org/blogarchives/2005/03/minimozilla _com.html
Yes! No more "cheap viagra now!" popups on my palm pilot!
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.
That said I am often frustrated by PocketIE. While it works (and rather well) the fact that you can't have more than one window open (no tabs) SERIOUSLY hampers me. I can't tell you how many times I'd like to open a link in a second window/tab to look at in a minute or load while I continue reading, or open a collection of 2/3 links to look at. But instead I have to choose one or the other and read that now. Then I have to remember how to get back to where I was to find the other links, and remember which links those were. I haven't browsed using a single window on any platform in at least 5 years, probably more. So this feels like a HUGE limitation to me and really cramps my browsing style.
Having not only a second option from Pockete IE, but one that might allow me tabs/windows would be fantastic. I will download it the second it's released.
Horray for MiniMo!
Comment forecast: Bits of genius surrounded by a sea of mediocrity.
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.
That's what Opera is for. Mini devices. Fork over the $30 or however much it costs, it's worth it if you use your device to surf the web.
Le français vous intéresse?
Thank god. The crappy html browser in the windows smartphone platform (bastardized internet explorer) was the only thing holding me back from getting one of the smartphones out there today. Symbian is still a hot contender but most symbian phones are way too bulky for my use. For some reason the windows smartphones seem to be much slimmer. Sendo has a nice proprietary smartphone setup with their Sendo X but they still haven't worked all the bugs out. The ability to use a "real" browser with a smartphone just tipped the scales, goodbye Ericsson P910!
Link to minimo project
--Fairfax Underground: Where Fairfax County comes out to play
I just noticed that Minimo for WinCE can already be downloaded at http://www.mozillazine.org/talkback.html?article=6 097.
MiniMo? Some other suggestions:
BrushFire
DamnSmallMozilla
MoWin
Fox Trot (it's a mobile device, isn't it?)
Fox-CE (pronounced Foxy)
Small Fox (it can be a catchy epidemic)
LilMo
how does minimo sound homosexual? (not that there's anything wrong with it if it does). If it bothers you just deepen your voice and say it like you're sharpening an axe or something.
It's totally in how you say it. For example, right now I'm prancing around saying "Mantorp!" in a really high pitched girly voice. How do you like that?
Which sounds "gay" now huh? [Deep Axe Murderer Voice] MiniMo@$*&! or [Prancy Girl Voice] Mantorp!
Yeah I thought so.
And just so you know. Homosexuals everywhere are offended by your use of the word gay. I could see if they named it "HomoMo" or "AnalMo" or maybe even "SuperFlamingMo" but MiniMo? No way...
And while we're on the topic, are you really so insecure about a simple word like "MiniMo" that you might think twice about using a superior browser to one that's total crap yet has a name like "SteakKnife Gun Browser?"
Maybe we should all join hands and prance around saying Mantorp, because you know what... I BET IT'S MORE FITTING!
On my Zaurus SL-C860, I can run the real Firefox (or Mozilla) with pdaXrom, not to mention a whole load of other apps, including abiword, gnumeric, and other apps that, while not exactly full-blown on the PC side, completely blow away anything on the PDA side.
With the latest betas, things are working with very minimal headache. If you're looking for PDA apps, this is a dream come true; if you're looking for a unix workstation in your pocket, this is also a dream come true. Or if you want gvim and gcc in your pocket. Or if you want snes9x in your pocket. Etc. You get the picture.
It's really awesome to have a Linux workstation in your pocket that can dial via bluetooth through your cellphone anywhere you can get reception. Take photos with your camera, edit them right there with the latest GIMP, upload them to your server.
It may seem obscenely expensive for a PDA, but it's also obscenely functional. You can't find a laptop this size, and it does just about everything you'd want a laptop to, except play the latest 3D games.
Don't think of it as a flame---it's more like an argument that does 3d6 fire damage
I think Minimo needs some companions.
Like MiniLarry, and MiniCurly.
DarkMantle I been bored, so I started a blog.
nothing really compares to the size and quality of opera. It even supports common Linux handhelds (minimo is not Qtopia based so it only runs under X). But more than that opera has the BEST small screen rendering.
The war with islam is a war on the beast
The war on terror is a war for peace
It just doesn't render very good. I wrote this post using it on my Axim x50v.
Who uses the internet on there Pocket PC? It takes way to long just to type in a web address!
You don't have to type the URL every time you go to a site, you know? That's what favorites/bookmarks and links are for. I mostly use the PocketPC to check my favorite sites and not for general browsing. And for this type of usage it's great.
"Mínimo" is Spanish for minimal.
The revolution will not be televised.
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.
Pictures
How long until MiniMo is ported to the Zaurus 5x00/6000L on the default Sharp ROM or OPIE ROM? I'm going to venture a wild guess of "never", seeing as I'm fairly sure this would likely require a rewrite of practically all the GUI code (to use QTopia libs)...
Is Capitalism Good for the Poor?
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?
No way. Nearly impossible. Not only would it require an extremely long time to do this, such an application would be both enormously complex and so different than the original that'd it be much easier to write a brand new browser. Symbian platform would be a bit easier, as would Palm OS, but as you see here, Windows Mobile handheld platforms aren't too much trouble, and Linux is hardly any work at all. Java MIDP has many constraints, such as the lack of a true filesystem and memory/filesize constraints, that would make this very difficult. The one MIDP Java web browser (ReqWireless, I think) I've seen uses a special proxy to pre-render pages into an easy-to-digest format. An older version of Handspring Blazer did the same thing.
...one eighth your size"
"I shall call him... mini-mo"
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Ah Ha! Now we know where those pesky WMDs are!
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 really need a lightweight web browser for an older machine, I would recommend
Dillo - a nice lightweight browser, but no CSS or Javascript. Requiress GTK something.
Links 2 - Runs in X, frame buffer, SVGA. Some CSS and Javascript support.
Both are very lightweight and I've used both on ancient machines that needed "something." I'll usually include Firefox as a backup for sites that really need it.I've got NetFront 3 on my h6315, and it works fairly well. It definitely does a better (albeit still quite imperfect) job at rendering pages for easy hand-readability than Pocket IE. As anyone with a Pocket PC knows, the worst thing in the world is a page that renders in such a way that requires you to scroll left and right and back again over and over to read a column of text. It doesn't look like MiniMo does anything to address that (yet, anyway).
/. on Pocket IE? /. seriously needs to get with the program and create alternate layouts for this stuff. Google's smart enough to detect that you're using a handheld and arrange itself accordingly, why shouldn't /.? Has anyone else noticed that GMail has a non-DHTML version now that works with old/non-standard browsers such as Pocket IE? Of course, I just use the POP mail, but it's nice anyway.
Anyone here had the misery of trying to read
Other features of Netfront are some Javascript capability, and tabs, fullscreen browsing, and scroll mode (where your stylus moves the page, which helps a lot with the ones that don't render well). MiniMo will need all of these features before I consider switching.
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.
That's an unsubstantiated anti-Microsoft troll.
You must be new here.
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