Mozilla to Develop Mobile Firefox

Kelson writes "Mozilla has announced a new initiative to bring Mozilla to the mobile web, including a fully functional mobile version of Firefox (yes, with extensions). The focus will be part of Mozilla 2, the big revision coming after Gecko 1.9 and Firefox 3. Minimo, the previous attempt to port Mozilla to mobile platforms, is apparently dead, but 'has already provided us with valuable information about how Gecko operates in mobile environments, has helped us reduce footprint, and has given us a platform for initial experimentation in user experience.'"

Comments

By the time....

[CRCulver]

I'll bet that at the sluggish rate Gecko development proceeds, by the time the mobile version appears, mobile devices will have almost the power of today's stationary hardware.

Re:By the time....

[Kelson]

I'll bet that at the sluggish rate Gecko development proceeds, by the time the mobile version appears, mobile devices will have almost the power of today's stationary hardware.

Wow! Someone who actually read the article!

Re:By the time....

[AKAImBatman]

FTFA:

Getting a no-compromise web experience on devices requires significant memory (>=64MB) as well as significant CPU horsepower. High end devices today are just approaching these requirements and will be commonplace soon For example, the iPhone has 128MB of DRAM and somewhere between a 400 to 600 MHz processor. It is somewhere between 10x-100x slower on scripting benchmarks than a new MacBook Pro and somewhere between 3-5x slower than an old T40 laptop on the same wifi network. But rapid improvements in mobile processors will close this gap within a few years.

I find this to be a rather shocking statement. The author is claiming that a handheld that meets the minimum requirements for a modern web browser on a desktop OS is not quite sufficient to run an embedded version? If that's really the consensus of the Mozilla developers, then my opinion is that they need to reevaluate how their approaching phone handsets. It is not a desktop platform, nor will you get the best experience by treating a handset as a desktop platform. As Apple and Opera have been showing with their embedded browsers, the interface should be designed around the phone rather than forcing the phone to be designed around the interface.

Re:By the time....

[Anonymous Coward]

Don't worry emo kid, Gecko is open source. Go fix it instead.

Re:By the time....

[mrslacker]

Perhaps (time, not reading the article), but there's another important player here that should be blatantly obvious, but no one has mentioned. That is of course Mozilla Foundation's best friend, Google. In particular, their emphasis on mobile platforms and Gphone. Guess what browser the gphone will have. In any case, there'll be a good deal of leverage and motivation from Google to make this happen sometime soon.

Re:By the time....

[larry bagina]

WebKit/kjs/khtml is open source (LGPL, BSD-like) and used by Apple and Nokia and will be included with Qt 4.4. Yeah, Google sends a lot of cash to the MoFo (and I think they may have contributed code as well), but they're also Apple friendly and using WebKit would probably be less work.

Re:By the time....

[Anonymous Coward]

The article discusses performance issues, which have little to do with the actual UI that the phone uses. I'm sure the mozilla devs aren't planning on shoehorning the entire firefox UI onto mobile devices as is.

Re:By the time....

[Jussi K. Kojootti]

Saying "Nokia uses browser X" doesn't really make your point since Nokia uses pretty much all major rendering engines in their products, including gecko...

it's a pattern of behaviour

[User 956]

Mozilla has announced a new initiative to bring Mozilla to the mobile web, including a fully functional mobile version of Firefox (yes, with extensions).

The thing I like about Firefox, is it's something people can really embrace, and extend.

Re:it's a pattern of behaviour

[Daimanta]

Hey there Bill. Wait, what are you doing with that extinguisher. No, wait, STOP, WAAAAAGGGGHH

Re:it's a pattern of behaviour

[master5o1]

but never extinguish -- that's microsoft's job to try to do (and fail).

reduced footprint?

[moderatorrater]

I wish they would carry those lessons over to firefox sometime soon.

Re:reduced footprint?

[Anonymous Coward]

+1

Re:reduced footprint?

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah, if Mobile FF only requires 500MB of RAM to run then I can finally run it on my laptop!

Re:reduced footprint?

[Fallingcow]

I'm hoping that I can run the mobile version on my desktop.

Re:reduced footprint?

[JerkBoB]

Damn, you guys beat me to it.

I suppose it's obvious, though...

mjmac@ganymede:~$ ps axwu | grep firefox
mjmac 13089 0.9 11.3 786244 232776 ? Sl Oct09 16:47 /usr/lib/firefox/firefox-bin

Isn't firefox supposed to be the lightweight alternative to Mozilla? *cough*

Re:reduced footprint?

[ozphx]

Needing three gig of RAM on my PDA should be enough for anyone....

Re:reduced footprint?

[sumdumass]

It was, then they killed mozilla off officially so there is no "real" comparison.

Just wait until FireFox 3 comes around and that old adage of reusing old hardware goes out the window with the Windows XP requirements. Does it all make you wonder? Makes me wonder.

Re:reduced footprint?

[Freultwah]

uwaga ~ # ps axwu | grep seamonk raivo 7285 5.5 12.4 334896 129092 ? SLl Oct10 66:54 /usr/lib/seamonkey/seamonkey-bin -mail It's as real as it gets.

Re:reduced footprint?

[MeditationSensation]

What about Seamonkey?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mozilla_Application_Suite

Re:reduced footprint?

[sumdumass]

Lol.. Outside the obvious that Seamonkey isn't called Mozilla. Don't you get it, it was a play on words. Well all know that sea monkey is a mozilla continuation. But it isn't called mozilla.

Those of us who know, would have to say that firefox was a fast lightweight alternative to seamonkey after the mozilla application suit was terminated and seamonkey rose from it's ashed. well that is if we want people to compare Firefox to mozilla that is.

Why have 23 flavors when you can't do vanilla?

[Anonymous Coward]

How about getting Firefox to run on the desktop for more than 3 hours at a time?

Re:Why have 23 flavors when you can't do vanilla?

[Paradigm_Complex]

It's quite possible to have different people working on different things at the same time. Funky how there's been updates to fx2 while fx3 was in development, isn't it? I agree fx still needs a good bit of work, and awesomely enough it's getting it irrelevant of whether or not another related project is underway.

Re:Why have 23 flavors when you can't do vanilla?

[Anonymous Coward]

"It's quite possible to have different people working on different things at the same time"

Sigh...the computing world is waiting for the open source crowd to finally grow up.

And waiting...

And waiting...

Re:Why have 23 flavors when you can't do vanilla?

[Atti K.]

It can run at least for two days. See JerkBoB's comment above. It was started on Oct 9th. It just uses a few hundred MB's of RAM :P

Re:Why have 23 flavors when you can't do vanilla?

[Anubis350]

Amen, there's nothing like coming home after a weekend and finding that on my Mac Pro, with 5GB of ram, firefox is using 4.5GBs of that :-p

Re:Why have 23 flavors when you can't do vanilla?

[afidel]

Huh? The copy of Mozilla that I'm posting this on has been open since 2.0.0.7 was release which was about a month ago. I run 13 addons that are are a mix of very popular and not so popular, and since 2.0 came out I've had very few stability problems. I still wish it did a better job of release cache memory, or at least had a GC procedure I could manually launch to free up all the ram except the currently in use parts, but that's my only real remaining complaint.

Re:Why have 23 flavors when you can't do vanilla?

[Baerinin]

I still wish it did a better job of release cache memory, or at least had a GC procedure I could manually launch to free up all the ram except the currently in use parts,

I don't know what OS you're using, but I have found that iFreeMem does a great job freeing up my inactive memory.

Re:Why have 23 flavors when you can't do vanilla?

[afidel]

I'm specifically talking about when Firefox grows to using hundreds of MB of ram over extended periods of time and doesn't release it even when I close like half my 50+ open tabs. It would be nice if you could tell the engine that you want to purge the data cache that it keeps to improve browser performance. While I generally like the performance I gain from the way that FF uses ram there are times when it would be much easier to purge the data cache then either let the OS page it out then back in later or closing the browser and dealing with the opening of 25 tabs the next time I fire it up.

Re:Why have 23 flavors when you can't do vanilla?

[Damo2k]

atuc210 edamore 75> ./ucb/ps auxw | grep firefox edamore 5245 0.7 10.9232272217400 pts/9 S Oct 02 171:14 /home/edamore/tools/firefox/firefox-bin It runs for large number if days for me, but it does exit for unknown reasons out of the blue randomly.

Re:Why have 23 flavors when you can't do vanilla?

[DrXym]

I use Firefox all day, every day sometimes with 20 tabs open. I won't say it never crashes but it manages to last a hell of a lot longer than 3 hours on average. I don't have issues with the memory either considering the number of tabs, session history, cache and so on.

If memory really bothers people they should turn their settings down and modify their browsing behaviour since Firefox takes the sensible default approach of using whatever memory you have to optimize the user experience.

Re:Why have 23 flavors when you can't do vanilla?

[ultranova]

It's quite possible to have different people working on different things at the same time.

Maybe, but in this case it doesn't make sense. Firefox contains (a) memory leak(s), which make it neccessary to restart it regularly. Computer users put up with such, to put it frankly, piece of shit programming, but the users of other appliances won't, even if a modern cellphone is essentially a computer with radio receiver and transmitter. So, until the leak(s) have been plugged, there is no point in putting efforts towards a mobile Firefox; and, judging by how long they have persisted, I'd imagine them to be quite non-trivial and work-intensive to fix.

Re:Why have 23 flavors when you can't do vanilla?

[jesup]

My "normal" situation is 7-10 Firefox windows open, with 5-25 tabs per window (for normal use, not instances of Mozilla I'm testing). Typically the total number of tabs is 100-150 depending on which machine we're talking about. The one I'm typing on here has been running (on Centos)since July 16th (and that was when it was shut down for an upgrade to Firefox 2), and the run before that had been up since around November (on 1.5.x). 440MB resident; 650MB virtual size, after 3 months of 150 tabs and daily use. When I shut down to upgrade Firefox in July, it was around 500MBish, with 100+ tabs.

Things that help stability/mem-usage:

• Don't use Flash (I don't have it installed)- and if you do, use FlashBlock
• Don't use every new extension under the sun - I use a very limited set
• I don't use RSS (much) - not sure if this helps
• PDFs are displayed by external apps, not in-browser-window
• This isn't under Windows....
• Don't use Flash

What is with the Mozilla naming conventions?

[R2.0]

Is it really necessary to consult a chart to make sense of their products?

"Mozilla 2, the big revision coming after Gecko 1.9 and Firefox 3."

So 2 is after 1.9, but is also after 3. But it's Firefox 3. But the product named Mozilla, the suite, stopped at 1.7.X, and was replaced by Seamonkey 1.0, which is really Mozilla 1.8.

Anybody?

Re:What is with the Mozilla naming conventions?

[domatic]

"Firefox 3" refers to an upcoming product release that will use the "Gecko 1.9" html/web renderer. "Mozilla 2" apparently refers to the APIs and release products based on them that will be what developers focus on once current developments (FF3 and Gecko 1.9) are finished.

Re:What is with the Mozilla naming conventions?

[savala]

Mozilla 2 == Gecko 2. Mozilla is the catchall name for the platform, with a version number equal to that of the rendering engine.

Individual products (such as Firefox, SeaMonkey, Camino, Thunderbird, etc, etc, etc) all have their own versioning scheme, as decided upon by their respective marketing people. This is the only number end-users should care about (for their own favorite product), but developers can always refer back to the gecko/mozilla version to know how these products relate to each other.

Re:What is with the Mozilla naming conventions?

[drew]

The only thing I can figure out is that they found inspiration in Sun's version numbering for Java releases, and decided that they had to do one better. Or is that 0.1?

Re:What is with the Mozilla naming conventions?

[toleraen]

Replace Gecko with the Linux kernel and Firefox/Seamonkey/Mozilla with Redhat/Ubuntu/Slackware.

Back end --> Front end. Where's the confusion here?

Re:What is with the Mozilla naming conventions?

[Anonymous Coward]

Build identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 6.0; en-US; rv:1.8.1.7) Gecko/2007091417 Firefox/2.0.0.7

Simple.

Re:What is with the Mozilla naming conventions?

[Arterion]

The Mozilla/5.0 part is a little confusing, but I think that's a hold-over from Netscape days. But if you look you'll see rv:1.8.1.7, which is the version of Gecko, which they seem to be calling "Mozilla" in this summary.

Re:What is with the Mozilla naming conventions?

[Anonymous Coward]

The Mozilla/5.0 part is a little confusing, but I think that's a hold-over from Netscape days. Probably because of old, really broken code, that was only designed to test for IE or Netscape (Mozilla/5.0). I wonder if they'll ever update it, or if they'll continue catering to code that doesn't know which millenium we're in.

Phone leakage

[Anonymous Coward]

Great, now I can have a clunky, memory leaker on my phone! weee!

great!

[botkiller]

Sweet, now my phone can crash as much as my computer while I'm browsing the net! Before developing for mobile devices, maybe they should fix some of the gaping memory holes in FF, considering your average mobile device doesn't have 200 megs of memory to devote to FF's bloating.

Re:great!

[sumdumass]

So why is it that every time a story about Mozilla or firefox makes it to slashdot, there are all sorts of posts talking about the bugs people are see when using the software, and they all get modded down someway or they get reply posts that claim you must be the only one with the problem.

Well, if that is true, and you are the only one with the problems, then you must have a bunch of slashdot accounts and somehow end up on my computer to cause the same issues there. I generally read at -1 so i see a lot of the stuff pushed out of general sight.

So I have to wonder, if this isn't a marvelously grand conspiracy to rag on firefox and the Mozilla foundation, and these problems actually exist, is telling someone they are the only ones with the problems or moding the comment down so that no one else can see it really a fix? I mean does hiding under the covers really mean the scary monster in the closet cannot get to you?

Re:great!

[Hyperspite]

I use firefox 2.0.0.7 on windows XP Pro and I can testify that if you leave your computer on for a long time, sometimes, depending on the phase of the moon, firefox's memory footprint will get freakishly large. This is pretty rare and you can just kill the process if it locks up or something. Of course, this happens when I'm working on a freakishly large image in gimp resulting in my HD thrashing....

Re:great!

[Anonymous Coward]

Mozilla has an open bug database which is where issues with Mozilla should be reported. It has tens of thousands of open reports so claiming that Mozilla is virtually bug free is quite ignorant, but the question is rather if those bugs actually affect the browsing experience. For me as a developer the answer to that question is yes, though I probably stress Mozilla harder than most when testing things that works in Opera.

For the general user though, I would expect Mozilla to be good enough, especially if keeping up with the latest security fixes and not using any addons with serious bugs in them.

(let's see if this is modded down as well)

Re:great!

[DrXym]

Perhaps you should type "about:cache?device=memory" into your address bar and you might see what most of that memory is being used for.

Re:Slashdot's new format licks balls!

[40ozFreak]

Sounds like a personal issue. I'm not having any problems.

I have never been a huge proponent of mobile web applications. I think phones already feel heavy and bloated with too many features, and having a memory-happy app from Gecko sitting on it isn't the direction I'd like to see.

Reduced footprint

[jimktrains]

Perhapses that knowledge could allow them to reduce the footprint of the full sized version, maybe? Hopefully?

Re:Reduced footprint

[Vexor]

They have a long way to go to catch up with Opera's performance. Excellent browser for viewing sites with loads of images/video etc.

Re:Reduced footprint

[wizardforce]

Perhapses that knowledge could allow them to reduce the footprint of the full sized version, maybe? Hopefully?

There seems to be a problem with Firefox's spell checker too. That should be fixed in the next release.

Re:Reduced footprint

[jimktrains]

" 'Perhapses that knowledge could allow them to reduce the footprint of the full sized version, maybe? Hopefully?'

There seems to be a problem with Firefox's spell checker too. That should be fixed in the next release."

Was that a knock at me? ispell, openoffice, and firefox all found nothing wrong with what I wrote. As for the spell checker, I find it quite useful and well designed (although there are somethings that trip it up).

Re:Reduced footprint

[Anonymous Coward]

" 'Perhapses that knowledge could allow them to reduce the footprint of the full sized version, maybe? Hopefully?'

There seems to be a problem with Firefox's spell checker too. That should be fixed in the next release."

Just because a spell checker doesn't catch a mistake doesn't mean there isn't one.

Re:Reduced footprint

[Anonymous Coward]

It was the "Perhapses"

Re:Reduced footprint

[wizardforce]

actually, I noticed that sometimes for whatever reason, it doesn't make it clear something isn't spelled right.

Re:Reduced footprint

[Kalriath]

It's not a bug, he was just spell checking using the Gollum dictionary. The English ones don't include "perhapses".

My Precccccciooooouuuuuuusssss?

Re:Reduced footprint

[jimktrains]

haha, do I feel foolish....

Thunderbird

[youthoftoday]

Is this what they forked Thunderbird for? To concentrate on this? Was it a trade?

Re:Thunderbird

[erikvcl]

Who knows. I can't understand those Mozilla people. They abandoned Mozilla, which had good performance and integrated e-mail for the piles-o-crap that are Firefox and Thunderbird. It's not since Gnome 1.0 that I've seen such buggy software. And not only that, but there is no integration between the two products at all. I have to manually configure Thunderbird by editing some obscure configuration to tell it that my web browser is Firefox. Thunderbird can't even open up a frigging JPEG by itself. Give me a break. If it weren't for the fact that they dropped support for Mozilla, I'd definitely go back.

The Mozilla folks have no business creating new products when they can't even get the products that they do produce right.

Re:Thunderbird

[nektra]

I think the community put a lot of trust on Mozilla foundation, and they are not following the same good ethics of foundations like Apache.

Re:Thunderbird

[erikvcl]

That's interesting. I assume you're being sarcastic... what do you mean regarding the ethics of foundations such as Apache?

I know that many slashdotters are frustrated with Firefox/Thunderbird like I am. I'm really excited to see what the open-source Eudora will look like.

Re:Thunderbird

[ncc74656]

And not only that, but there is no integration between the two products at all. I have to manually configure Thunderbird by editing some obscure configuration to tell it that my web browser is Firefox.

IME, that annoyance is limited to the Linux versions of Thunderbird & Firefox. They behave as you'd expect out-of-the-box on Windows & Mac OS X.

Re:Thunderbird

[erikvcl]

I'm sure you're right. But if they can't figure out how to get that working on Linux, we're in big trouble -- we have to question their competence. After all, this isn't 1997. Linux should be easy to use.

Re:Thunderbird

[nektra]

I mean the community put a lot of support to Mozilla foundation (e.g. NYPost advertising) as an alternative to IE/OE/OL, but the foundation didn't honour it ethically and democratically.

Re:Slashdot's new format licks balls!

[Anonymous Coward]

You say that like it's a bad thing.

Wonder if it's the same as MicroB on the N800...

[IANAAC]

I've been running MicroB on the Nokia N800 and it now handles pretty much any ajax site I throw at it. I had problems with many ajax sites using Opera 9, not to mention Minimo, but MicroB handles them nicely. Not many extensions available yet though.

come on now

[urban_warrior]

where's the fun in that? ms should port ie to mobile then we can all have fun trying too block pop-ups and other nasties on our cells.

Re:come on now

[jZnat]

There already is some sort of Pocket IE or something like that for Windows CE. I doubt it's related to the Windows NT version of IE in any way other than the name, though.

Re:come on now

[Kalriath]

You're referring to PIE (Pocket Internet Explorer. Tastes bad, not to be confused with Apple PIE or Apricot PIE).

Details page: http://www.microsoft.com/windowsmobile/microsoftprograms/iemobile.mspx.

It's ultra basic. No popup support, no Flash, no ... wait a minute... can I get it for Windows XP?

Re:come on now

[ceroklis]

It's ultra basic. No popup support, no Flash, no ... wait a minute... can I get it for Windows XP?

Yes you can... if you have the pocketpc emulator that comes with visual studio.

Already using Mozilla Browser on my N800

[c41rn]

Check out MicroB, a mozilla-based browser for the Maemo platform on the N800. I prefer it to the default Opera-based browser that the N800 ships with. It's based on Gecko 1.9.

Re:Already using Mozilla Browser on my N800

[vivek7006]

MicroB kicks ass! It has full AJAX support and allows me to use google maps, google docs & spreadsheet and google rssreader on my nokia N800. I love it

What about Opera?!?

[kyshtock]

Probably the best beer... pardon, browser in the world!

There is an Opera mobile browser available, and it acts quite nice. And it's here already!

However, downloadable extensions might be something interesting - if they are usefull on the smallish screen.

Re:What about Opera?!?

[Arterion]

Extensions are, I think, the number one cited reason why Firefox users don't want to switch to Opera. It's not just a nice addition, it's a deal-breaking feature.

Re:What about Opera?!?

[raju1kabir]

There is an Opera mobile browser available, and it acts quite nice.

Not for me. The trial version expired the day after I installed it, and I've never been able to get it to work again. I did not change the clock on my phone.

If that's how well the trial works, I'm not that eager to plunk down $24 for the real thing.

Re:What about Opera?!?

[Kelson]

If your phone has Java support, you could also try Opera Mini. It's a different approach that uses a thin client and a proxy (so it even works on low-end phones, as long as they have Java and a data plan that allows Internet access)...and it's free, so there's no risk of a trial running out.

Re:What about Opera?!?

[AaronLawrence]

I find Opera Mini very usable and responsive on my Nokia 6234 - which is not even a smartphone really, though it has a good screen. Their server does a great job of trimming down the pages so most pages come in 5-10kB. It's good enough that I would pay (a small amount). It also loads very fast for what I assume is a Java applet ... about 1-2 seconds.

what is the best broswer at the moment?

[schnikies79]

I have a cingular 8125 I use occasionally (when wifi is avail, no way I am paying mobile internet fee's) and this would be great. I have IE and Opera mobile on it, but end up mostly using IE. Opera mini was nice on my flip phone, but Opera Mobile doesn't render well at all. I have to side scroll all the time, and I can't stand side scrolling. The tabs and buttons keep it on my phone though.

Any recommendations on what the best browser avail right now is?

Re:what is the best broswer at the moment?

[ForestGrump]

I'd recommend a mix between PocketIE and opera. PocketIE does better on some pages, while Opera is better with others.

There are some PIE modifications out there that add tabs and such. Sorry that I can't give any names/links as I haven't used them in about 2 years.

Grump

Re:Wonder if it's the same as MicroB on the N800..

[Constantine XVI]

Yeah, it's Mozilla-based. Suprised it's not WebKit/KHTML (Safari, Konqueror and "Series 60 Web Browser"), given that Nokia puts it on all their S60 phones.

Google Phone

[Frosty Piss]

This isn't surprising considering Google's recent purchase of Mozilla, and the search giant's new focus on mobile with their Google Phone.

Re:Google Phone

[doti]

Yeah, a search giant needs a browser giant. :)

Odd item in Related Links

[Kelson]

Anyone else think that "Compare prices on Mozilla" is an odd choice to appear in the list of Related Links?

"Let's see, you can get it from this site for $0. But this one is offering it for $0. Or you could go over here and get it for $0, but they charge $0 for shipping. Hmm, I think I'll go with the place selling it for $29.95."

Re:Odd item in Related Links

[Goaway]

You only now noticed the "compare prices on" links that have been in ever story for years now, and that are nearly always incredibly inappropriate and hilarious?

Re:Odd item in Related Links

[darthflo]

No, you got it totally wrong!

Those sites aren't comparing the prices of the Mozilla suite or Mozilla's products, but the Mozilla foundation, corp and whatever's attached to it. Google leased them, now you have the chance of actually buying them (For three low low payments of only $50'000'000.00)!

Re:Nigzilla

[Paradigm_Complex]

I know it's tempting, but try not to feed the trolls. Sadly it doesn't seem to accomplish much except encourage them.

A new name?

[Arghdee]

I suggest they call it:

MObile FirefOx

Then, we can abbreviate that to Mofo.

Re:A new name?

[Anonymous Coward]

The Mozilla Foundation is already sometimes called MoFo, and it requires a much less retarded interpretation.

Re:A new name?

[butterwise]

I prefer FoxBile.

Minimo...was a disaster!

[PortHaven]

A huge broken nightmare. Wouldn't even uninstall...

*shudders*

Re:Minimo...was a disaster!

[speculatrix]

minimo has been working fine for me on Angstrom distro for Zaurus - just as well, 'cos it's the only useful browser in the Angstrom distribution - they chose not to include any old libraries so the old opera 7 from the Sharp original distro is not compatible, nor is netfront, and konqueror sucks, and firefox segfaults!

Re:Minimo...was a disaster!

[jeffstar]

I had a decent experience with minimo. Mind you I had 600Mhz pocket pc with as much memory as I could get. It was the only mobile browser I could find that could deal with XMLHttprequest.

The more, the merrier

[Kelson]

The more fully-capable mobile browsers are out there, the less we need to worry about a return to the bad old days when people designed one version of a site for Netscape and another version for Internet Explorer, then let one version bitrot. We've already seen the first rumblings of iPhone-only sites.

A mobile web with Opera, Firefox and Safari? It'll be a lot harder to justify picking one and locking out the rest.

Re:The more, the merrier

[Achromatic1978]

Yeah, it definitely seems like a lot of people who were the loudest "This site best viewed in Any Browser" chanters, got their iPhone and saw a chance to show off, forgetting how hypocritical they sounded going back to device-dependent design.

Re:Nigzilla

[athdemo]

This was moderated as off topic??

They could always

[Gr8Apes]

They could always pull a Sun and jump to Mozilla 5 (I guess 4 would work fine too)

Yes

[Anonymous Coward]

Is this what they forked Thunderbird for? To concentrate on this? Was it a trade?

To get Mobile Firefox, they traded Thunderbird, some draft picks, and a calendaring program to be named later.

Peer into the future

[Bobfrankly1]

Apple: Iphone burns up in owner's pocket, flames burn up to his neck
First slashdot post:
"Liar Liar pants on..."
...followed shortly by...
"Was he running FireFox?"
-

Is this because of the iPhone's Safari?

[MSRedfox]

I've used mobile versions of Opera, InternetExplorer, Minimo, and now Safari (and a few other off-brand browsers). Up until Safari, I found Opera to be the best for mobile browsing, but even it was lacking. The iPhone's Safari seems pretty good so far, still not perfect, but better then the rest. But with Safari, you're limited to using it only on the iPhone (or iPod touch). Hopefully this new development from Mozilla will offer a nice high quality mobile browser that is compatible with multiple devices. I'm looking forward to a browser war for the mobile market, its about time we got a choice of good quality browsers instead of being stuck with low grade versions that can't even render simple pages well.

Let the browsers wars start again.

Re:Is this because of the iPhone's Safari?

[Reverberant]

But with Safari, you're limited to using it only on the iPhone (or iPod touch).

Let the browsers wars start again.

True for Safari proper, but don't forget that Webkit has been ported to Symbian

Re:Is this because of the iPhone's Safari?

[Anonymous Coward]

I think Safari might be very good for the mobile browser race. Until it came along Opera was kind of the only usable browser with no real competition since the rest were wml readers with some html extensions. Now there is a new kid on the block and that should inspire Opera to make an even faster browser with more features. The iPhone browser (safari) has some pretty exciting features (sure, they depend on an excellent hardware) that might compensate for other shortcomings so when you take those and mix with the Opera 9 engine, we (the users) will be the big winners.

the best comment

[Catcher80]

The best comment I've heard yet isn't on slashdot (not surprisingly) but from a blog by Russell Beattie...

We've gone from almost no advanced mobile browsers just a few years ago, to a ton of choices. It makes you wonder if Mozilla could do something else to enhance the mobile web, rather than re-creating the wheel with yet another browser that works on the phone.

With that being said, the article also says "Mobile Firefox will arrive later (certainly not before 2008)." That's a lot of time for them to come up with a great product, but it's also enough time for the Mobile hardware industry to completely turn around. Mobile phones are the new laptops people, it's true. Well, ok not yet but real soon now. Minimo (Mozilla's *apparently* failed attempt at a mobile browser) ran like hell on my HTC Wizard (Cingular 8125) but I believe by the time Mobile Firefox is available, things like plugins will be usable. They sure aren't right now...

I'll sure never buy an iPhone, but I thank Apple for motivating everyone else.

Fix the rest of the problems first

[Anonymous Coward]

Anyone remember when Phoenix was supposed to be lean and mean and fast? Now we have "Firepig".

I mean, Jeez....... The focus problems, the javascript engine single threading that constantly dogs the performance, the memory leaks, the slow performance.

I still use Firefox 0.8 because the subsequent versions stink!

Documented in this thread: http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=306595&threshold=4&commentsort=0&mode=thread&cid=20730691

And the Mozilla Foundation Top 20 Excuses for Not Fixing Firefox Bugs:

http://it.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=195983&threshold=1&commentsort=0&mode=thread&cid=16065371

Re:Fix the rest of the problems first

[webmaster404]

Have you tried FF3? It is super fast compared to FF2, which was faster then FF1. In a world where speed is everything and as Vista shows, you can always tell people to buy a new computer/ram/CPU/graphics card using 50 MB of memory really isn't that much when you get the speed and speed has historically been the reason why people used IE, it was what stopped me from going all FF back when I used Windows, because FF is so poorly optimized in the default state. And for bugs, sure they are not all fixed but its better then the alternatives, Opera which is closed source, IE which is insecure 100% of the time and doesn't run on Linux, Konquorer which is lean and fast, but lacks support and a flash plugin, and I don't like the UI of Safari, plus it doesn't work on Linux anyways. Sure there are always "alternitive" browsers like Epiphany and Galelion but they are based on Gecko and work just about the same as FF. So yes, FF isn't the greatest, but its better then the competition and I hope that the new Minimo will help optimize the rendering speed of FF, something that I really want more then code optimization for resources

Re:Fix the rest of the problems first

[Anonymous Coward]

Have you tried FF3? It is super fast compared to FF2, which was faster then FF1.

Thanks for the suggestion. Gave it a shot. Bunches of lib issues under gentoo when I tried the binary... but building from source went surprisingly well. A few tweaks later (emacs key bindings, change action key to alt, disable tabs in favor of middle click opens new window) and I'm up on ffox 3... I have to say that it is a huge improvement in performance over ffox2. Performance seems similar to my beloeved 0.8.....

The focus is better but still very buggy. Took about 60 seconds to find the first (new) focus bug. I move from one window to another and very quickly middle click a link. That should open a new window with the link contents. But if the move-click sequence is fast, it does nothing. If you move at a Grandma's pace it seems to work. The link I am middle-clicking on becomes underlined so it seems to be getting the event. This is a different focus/pointer problem than I've seen in the past.

For me, a browser that can't "keep up" with link clicks is a deal breaker. Given the piss poor response to past bug filings, I am not interested in wasting my time filing.

I'd like to force a firefox developer to sit down in front of a virgin knoppix machine to see these bugs. Surely kidnapping in that case could be excused?

Hope there will be a Firebug-like dev tool

[ishmalius]

It would be really awesome if a mobile tool gets the same kind of debugging support that currently exists with Firefox and Firebug. Nothing comparable exists in the desktop browser world. What once involved writing for IE first, then adding W3 features later, now is developing on FF/FB, and then -porting- to IE. What a wonderful change has occurred in the dev landscape.

Re:Wonder if it's the same as MicroB on the N800..

[jrumney]

IIRC, Nokia was the main developer behind the GTK port of WebKit, which was still a work in progress a couple of months ago when I looked at it. Maybe they've abandoned it now that MicroB has come along.

Ever looked at /. on a WinCE mobile?

[(H)elix1]

With phones becoming more common as internet devices, you would think sites would be a bit more friendly to those sorts of devices. Yes, /. does have a 'palm' version.... but using the low bandwidth variant for normal surfing is just painful on the embedded version of IE my Cingular 8525 bundles with Windows Mobile. The low bandwidth version style sheets list the article summary...

one
word
per
line

For whatever reason, the comments render correctly on it. To think I got this phone because it *has* wifi. Argh.

So anyhow, other browser options are welcome. I know I could buy Opera for the phone, but... I'd rather buy another phone and get rid of this 'smartphone'. Free, however, is just my speed. If it renders this site correctly, I know I'll give it a whirl.

Re:Ever looked at /. on a WinCE mobile?

[toleraen]

Slashdot looks just fine on my 8525, IE Mobile seems to do a good job with it anyway. See here. The crappy trial screenshot program blew it up so it looks nice and jaggy, but on the device the page looks fine to me. That's under "One Column" format btw.

Reduced memory footprint??

[Em Ellel]

Firefox on mobile devices? Great, but where do I get 2GB of ram for my treo?

They have tries before

[suv4x4]

But failed since they couldn't reduce the footprint and achieve acceptable performance.

The reason they are trying again, is that after Firefox 3 comes the time of Tamarin, the ECMAScript engine in Flash Player, which will also power the Firefox releases after 3. Spidermonkey and Tamarin is like night and day.

So, in fact, Adobe saved the day here.

Re:They have tries before

[RebelWebmaster]

Tamarin has very little to nothing to do with it. It has everything to do with massively cutting back on XPCOM usage within the codebase and other architectural changes which couldn't be made in a 1.x build for compatibility reasons.

In fact, Tamarin currently needs a fair amount of optimization to reach parity with Spidermonkey (in the case of untyped data anyway).

time could be better spent elsewhere

[Exter-C]

I am all for open source going into new markets, I do feel that in the case of mozilla with firefox that they should really focus on resolving many of the bugs and really working on providing a rock solid, secure fast and stable "full scale" browser. Once they have finalised that work on a mobile browser.

Re:time could be better spent elsewhere

[RebelWebmaster]

Did you even RTFA? The point is that Mozilla2 (the backend for ALL Gecko 2.0-based browsers, including Firefox 4.0) is going to be cleaning things up so much that making a lightweight mobile browser is a realistic option. The wins that will be good in the mobile space are going to be going in to the main codebase first and foremost. The only change is that with the code lighter, a mobile browser is something which can be made well and supported well.

Webkit

[Anonymous Coward]

Mozilla fears Webkit. Webkit went from not interesting to the new star of the future very quickly. First the KDE project made their peace with Webkit with Trolltech announcing it'll include it in the next Qt release. Following that were people doing proof-of-concept ports of Webkit to the Gnome Mobile platform and showing that it was far less ressource intensive and faster than Mozilla or Opera on mobiles. The same could be shown for the OLPC. Following that, quite some companies recently started investing heavily in a Webkit port to Gnome.

If you now consider that both KDE and Gnome don't like Mozilla very much (because it suffers from extensive NIH), you'll realize that if Mozilla doesn't get their act together, they'll lose the Linux market to Webkit. And Linux is the next big thing in the Mobile world, so they'll also lose the mobile market. And from there it's only a short way to losing a lot of hobbyist developers, since those use Linux.

Re:Webkit

[BZ]

> (because it suffers from extensive NIH)

Do you have a reference for this in the context of GNOME? Were there patches being rejected with NIH reasons? Were decisions being made to not use GNOME-provided facilities and roll one's own instead? Just curious.

I do seem to recall Mozilla doing things like switching to the GTK-native filepicker once it got its non-ASCII-text act together, even though it was still functionally inferior to the XUL filepicker that had been used before that (for example it was much slower).

In fact, Mozilla is currently having quite the opposite problem in some ways. They're trying to use cairo and pango and so forth and discovering all sorts of issues, ranging from pango hanging if you ask it to deal with a string longer than 65K chars (happens on the web, with a long chunk of text) to performance issues in pango, Render, cairo, and fontconfig (little things like using Render to scale images being much slower than using xlib directly, for images with no alpha channel, which is most of the web).

At the moment, it's looking like Mozilla will effectively drop support for anything older than FC6 or equivalent (in terms of libraries) in the next Gecko release simply because the older system stuff is too buggy in various ways to work with, and the decision has been made to be a good citizen and use the system libraries.

Bah

[StikyPad]

Call me when it can properly display my favorite world wide web site.

Pennywise

[meehawl]

So instead of spending a little on an excellent browser for your expensive phone, you'd rather go buy a new phone? Presumably, another expensive one. Yes, I can see how that makes sense, oh yes.

Re:Pennywise

[(H)elix1]

Well, here are a few screen shots of how the OOTB browser renders /. in simple design, low bandwidth, and no icons.

While buying a new browser would fix the surfing issues, the 'smart phone' is just as deficient in other areas - email, phone, alarm, etc. It would be good money after bad. I'm done with it. Going back to a Blackberry is an easy decision for someone who is on the road as much as I am. I talked about the other issues here.

Palm OS Version Please

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm looking forward to running this on my Palm TX! I have 5 browsers installed but none of them render as reliably as Gecko. Its strange they made Minimo for Windows devices, Palm OS is far superior and simpler.

amg

[operato]

what a lazy way of doing this. instead of making firefox work on small devices with small memory, they're just waiting for the mobile devices to have faster cpus and more memory.

when will then be now

[Gigadafud]

so how long before you are able to get this on the gphone......

heh

[justinlee37]

Maybe they should fix their spellchecker first.

Too Little Too Late

[Anonymous Coward]

WebKit is picking up steam. I think Mozilla dropped the ball a long time ago when it came to mobile web browsing.

Great News!!!

[Anonymous Coward]

Mozilla is coming to mobile devices? Great!

I was always telling my friends how much I missed having my cell phone crash, or have memory leaks, or lack any kind of security. It's amazing how the FOSS community always comes through for us!

put it on your card

[bombastinator]

from a 2mb SD card. You need generally to do the same with opera anyway. Also, iirc firefox comes out a little smaller when loaded on FAT32 because of the smaller block size.

Opera Mini

[meehawl]

Try Opera Mini on that phone, it renders well and the websites look just like their bigscreen versions... it does all that iphoney zooming stuff. But for screens this small, I am always thinking: why websites? Install an RSS reader, go for full text enclosures, and read content the way you want it formatted!

Trolls explained

[bunratty]

if this isn't a marvelously grand conspiracy to rag on firefox and the Mozilla foundation, and these problems actually exist, is telling someone they are the only ones with the problems or moding the comment down so that no one else can see it really a fix?

If not one person out of over 100 million users can demonstrate how to reproduce these problems, are they really so widespread that they need immediate attention? Or are the people posting about these problems simply trolls for making the problems seem widespread and not giving any useful information about the problem? If, as these posters claim, Firefox has these terrible problems such as hogging memory, burning CPU, hanging, or crashing, why can't they explain in detail what needs to be fixed in Firefox? If these users looked in the MozillaZine Knowledge Base, they might just find that the problem is not in Firefox, but is a problem on their systems that can easily be fixed.

Re:Trolls explained

[sumdumass]

Wow, I guess this is the exact type of comment I was talking about.

If not one person out of over 100 million users can demonstrate how to reproduce these problems, are they really so widespread that they need immediate attention?

Are you sure it is 1 out of 100 million users? Last I heard that is more then the FF usages world wide if you consider all the post from different people make here claiming to have problems. SO I guess the first step is to acknowledge the problem is more real then not. Also, I shouldn't have to demonstrate how to do make it happen. I can tell you what I was doing before it happened, Sometimes it is just browsing after a while with ten or so tabs open and sometimes it is a few minute after watching a video. But the crash report generator thing the tells mozilla what is going on should have the information for them to track it down.

Or are the people posting about these problems simply trolls for making the problems seem widespread and not giving any useful information about the problem?

I know it is easy to dismiss what you don't want to hear. You can call them trolls or whatever and down mod them to get it out of sight. But that doesn't make it true. Sure, there might be a few trolls just saying things to say it. But I'm sure there are more real issue then trolls. just because it hasn't happened to you doesn't mean it isn't happening to anyone. We have things like slavery existing in todays times, I bet it isn't happening to you but that doesn't mean it doesn't happen to some. We have cops using tasers to punish peaceful students who speak out against democratic leaders giving speeches, it might not be happening to you and again, your lack or effect doesn't mean it isn't happening. This idea of you not personally experiencing it so everyone else must be a troll is a little ridiculous in retrospect.

If, as these posters claim, Firefox has these terrible problems such as hogging memory, burning CPU, hanging, or crashing, why can't they explain in detail what needs to be fixed in Firefox?

Because they are users, not developers. Some of them know enough to figure where the problem is comming from, that is why they are pointing to mozilla product. And it isn't that hard to make the connection either, you run a program, your computer runs like shit, smacks your wife and kicks your dog. It only happens when running that program, where is the problem, with your computer? you wife or dog? or that one program?

If everyone was a developer and possessed the means to figure out what needs fixed, then why would they need Mozilla to fix the stuff? They tell the mozilla team, and wait for something to happen. They mention it in places that brag Mozilla products because nothing has happened. And then they get a response of tell us what and how to fix it? Or the you are a troll and lets down mod you? Come on, I have been using mozilla product since before it was a full revision number and firefox wasn't even thought of publicly. Now I am told that I'm crazy when IE is more stable in most cases and I must be making something up because it never happened to you.

If these users looked in the MozillaZine Knowledge Base, they might just find that the problem is not in Firefox, but is a problem on their systems that can easily be fixed.

Yes, it is everyone else's fault. forget that IE doesn't have the issues I experience with firefox, forget that none or the other programs experience the issues, but it has to be your computer that wrong. I have looked through the knowledge base, followed the path that attempts to look to everything but firefox and I still have the issues. Right now, And I have restarted recently, with 2 windows open and about 5 tabs total between them, firefox is consuming 113 megs of memory. I have seen this number shoot up to almost 10 times that much. Of course I never check it before a crash because I don't

Re:Trolls explained

[bunratty]

At least this is the exact type of comment I was talking about. Did you notice you did not point out a single bug in Firefox? Try doing that instead of pointlessly rambling on. You generally need to be able to reproduce a bug in order to file a bug report. Maybe you are not able to reproduce it, but at least someone, somewhere, must be lucky enough to stumble upon steps to reproduce these allegedly widespread and serious bugs in Firefox, if they do exist. Right?

I'm not saying that I personally do not experience Firefox bugs. If you go to the Firefox Bugs forum on MozillaZine, you'll see hardly any Firefox bugs at all. Almost all the problems discussed there have simple solutions in the Knowledge Base. If Firefox had serious widespread bugs, someone would be able to describe them to some extent out of the many thousands of posts in that forum. Wouldn't they?

The bottom line is that I do believe you are experiencing problems with Firefox. You are not making it up. But if you want us to believe that it is a bug in Firefox, and not some other problem on your computer, someone should back it up with the tiniest shred of evidence. That way we can all see the problem and do something about it. Ranting about vague, unspecified problems in Firefox is useless.

Re:Trolls explained

[sumdumass]

You know, I though that is what the crash report thing did. It sent the information to the firefox team so they can fix it. Although the updates don't seem to address it. As for a bug report, No, it isn't something readily reproduced outside knowing that when using firefox for a period of time, it will crash. Sometimes it restores everything and sometimes it doesn't. But because I cannot make it do it on command, doesn't mean there isn't a bug.

Maybe bug is the wrong word? Maybe serious flaw should be used instead of bug. But as I am typeing this, I'm on a different computer, It was just restarted and I have three tabs open with one window. Firefox is already using 65 megs of memory. I let it sit for 10 minutes and it is upto 70 megs then jumps back down to 59 or so. But then it climbs right back up to 80 megs now. After about 4 minutes the lowest it will go is 53 megs now. Suppose i left this on over night. What would the memory usage be then? seems like something is waisting memory. And maybe the crashes are when tons or memory is being used, I don't know. That's what the crash report is for. The only reason I let it send it because they are supposed to be using that instead of me having to know then ins and outs of firefox so I can create a bug report and tell them what is wrong myself.

The bottom line is that I do believe you are experiencing problems with Firefox. You are not making it up. But if you want us to believe that it is a bug in Firefox, and not some other problem on your computer, someone should back it up with the tiniest shred of evidence. That way we can all see the problem and do something about it. Ranting about vague, unspecified problems in Firefox is useless.

Heres the thing. I don't know that I can personally say anything more about it other then it crashes. There isn't really anything consistent about it. sometimes I have to open the process manager/task list and kill the firefox process in order to restart it. I wrote what I did because I see other complaining about the same things, maybe not exactly the same, but it is close enough to catch my eye. I send the crash reports when they happen. But when I see these people getting moded down and other claiming "it works for me, you must be a troll" when they make a statement about it, I have to wonder if the same things aren't happening on the bug page.

I have been using Mozilla products ever since Mandrake 8.0 introduced me to them. I loved them and have become so accustom to using Firefox, Tabbed browsing, thunder bird, and so on, that I actually get pissed when I have to use IE, outlook or Safari. I never had this problem until firefox 2, I can uninstall it and go back to firefox 1.5 and not experience an issue. I use only one extension, FireFTP and it is on only one of my 4 computers at the house (actually 2 of them went back to 1.5) and about three of the ones I service at different sites. I don't know why or how it could be my computers when it only happens to Firefix version 2 and only when running it. I update each and every time in hopes of it being fixed. I'm not sure if there is much I can do except complain, send in the crash reports and wait. But I have to wonder when I see everyone else with similar complaint getting marked trolls and being told that there is nothing wrong because it works fine with them.

And in case your wondering, I have two windows XP SP2 one with 2.07 and one with 1.5 because of the issues, one windows 98se with 2.0, and a dedicated mandrake 9.3 box with 2.0 Both XPs can dual boot into either Mandrake 2007 or CentOS 4.something with firefox 2.something (I don't log into them much).

Re:Trolls explained

[bunratty]

You know, I though that is what the crash report thing did. It sent the information to the firefox team so they can fix it. Although the updates don't seem to address it.

Yes, you are correct up to a point. If it is a crash in Firefox, yes the Firefox team can fix it. If it is a crash in a driver or a plugin or it is caused by bad hardware, they cannot. It sounds like it is not a bug in Firefox you are experiencing if Firefox crashes a lot on you and the developers do not seem to be addressing your problem. To find out, follow the link in the MozillaZine Knowledge Base article on Firefox crashing and post details of the crash such as the Talkback ID in the Firefox Bugs forum. Someone can help you determine where the crash is occurring by looking up the crash signature for the Talkback report.

But because I cannot make it do it on command, doesn't mean there isn't a bug.

Agreed. But complaining about the bug without giving any useful details such as the Talkback report identification is pointless. And it's been a very long time since I've seen someone point out a bug in Firefox that makes it crash often. Most often when Firefox crashes often, it's due to a problem with something other than Firefox. Before you say it's a bug in Firefox, just make the determination that it really is a bug in Firefox. To say that you've discovered a serious bug in Firefox without giving any details of the bug or even determining if it really is a bug in Firefox is trolling in my book. I'm still waiting for someone to point out a serious bug in Firefox 2 in the Firefox Bugs forum. Maybe you'll be the one!

Re:Trolls explained

[sumdumass]

It sounds like it is not a bug in Firefox you are experiencing if Firefox crashes a lot on you and the developers do not seem to be addressing your problem.

Or they don't know what is causing it and cannot fix it. I'm sort of suspecting it might be the spell checker but cannot show that to be the case. When I look at the fundamental differences between 1.5 and 2.0 on the same hardware with no extensions or the same plugins like Flash and java, the only thing different from a user's perspective is the spell checker. And the problems only seem to happen in 2.0 and above. I guess I could turn it off and check how long it would take to crash.

But it isn't limited to just crashing. Last night I viewed the linked article from the story about low tech inventions and popular mechanics. I opened the article in another tab, opened a few of the links in another tab and then firefox on a separate computer at work, it just froze the tabs. I could scroll up and down the pages, click on links to open in new tabs and so on, I could close them and see the next tab in line but I couldn't switch between the tabs to go from one page back to another. I had to kill the firefox process by hand to regain the abilit to switch between tabs. I have noticed this along with the crashing and so on at home. Siting here all night not being touched, after seeing firefox had about 65 megs of memory under it's control, when I checked before looking at slashdot, it has claimed 117 megs now. And nothing had happened to it other then just sitting there open with about three tabs in it. Of course it could be problems with the hardware and a lot of computers, It could be a popular extention that people don't know the are installing, or one that would work without issues in IE. I don't know what would cause it.

Agreed. But complaining about the bug without giving any useful details such as the Talkback report identification is pointless. And it's been a very long time since I've seen someone point out a bug in Firefox that makes it crash often. Most often when Firefox crashes often, it's due to a problem with something other than Firefox. Before you say it's a bug in Firefox, just make the determination that it really is a bug in Firefox. To say that you've discovered a serious bug in Firefox without giving any details of the bug or even determining if it really is a bug in Firefox is trolling in my book. I'm still waiting for someone to point out a serious bug in Firefox 2 in the Firefox Bugs forum. Maybe you'll be the one!

I know what you are saying but quite frankly, I have no clue where to get the talkback ID and really never heard of it before today. Now, I'm not saying it is new or don't exist. I believe it does after doing some searching. But If you or anyone else would expect A user to know about it, should it be a little less transparent and maybe more readily available for people to find? What I mean is, I'm not exactly a below average user. I support over 300 systems in about 25 locations. And after giving up on finding fixes and all, just sitting here hoping the crash reports get something in one of the updates that make it go away, i'm just now finding out about the crash report ID and having to be able to force it to crash so it can be reproduced. Well, I won't be able to get the reproduced part, This stuff has no apparent pattern to it. But I can find the ID and so on.

I guess if those are the rules, then they should be somewhere where they can be found easily. Like maybe in the help file where people first look when having issues. And maybe a help section for troubleshooting even if it only contains links to the official help sites. A google search can pop up tons of things before you get to the official site. I see they finally got the website back in line. Going to mozilla.org for a while produced nothing useful. It seemed like there was a fight over using firefox.com or something.

Re:Trolls explained

[bunratty]

Or they don't know what is causing it and cannot fix it. I'm sort of suspecting it might be the spell checker but cannot show that to be the case.

You can speculate until you're blue in the face, which is pointless, or you can simply give a Talkback ID and have someone look up the stack signature. Only a troll would continue to complain about problems instead of doing something productive about them. How to get the Talkback ID is explained in the relevant link in my first post. This is my common experience -- people continuing to complain simply are not reading the material I am pointing them to. They are trolls who just keep complaining.

Re:Trolls explained

[sumdumass]

Lol.. If this is your common experience, then you are misinterpreting a lot of people. My Continuing to complain is just letting you know what I am experiencing. You seemed to be interested in those specifics and fact. It has nothing to do with trolling. Unless troll has a new definition of saying anything you don't like.

And yes, I missed the part on the talk back ID thing. I followed your advice and looked for the mozillazine articles on crashing and I'm pretty sure none of them apply to me. OF course then again, there are instances that I won't have a crash ID, like when I have to kill Firefox because it just get slow and unresponsive for no appearent reason. I detailed that in one of my replies, and it was funny, but I had to kill FF again just before reading your post. Sitting here since about 4 am with five tabs in one windows open, It somehow managed to pull 95 megs of memory with it, which shouldn't be too bad on a system with 768 megs installed. But I have had it use a lot more memory and not become slow and unresponsive in the past. So yes, I will continue submitting the crash reports, do the talkback ID thing and look for a fix in one of the updates (or a competing product I can replace FF with if one can touch the features).

Thanks for your time.

About time . . .

[AncientPC]

For my Windows Mobile 6 based phone I've used Picsel, Pocket IE, Opera Mobile, Opera Mini, and Minimo. My favorite for reading RSS feeds is probably Pocket IE (not saying much), but Picsel is by far the most useful as it mimics rendering the whole page (closest to Safari UI). The only drawback is Picsel uses a lot of RAM and sometimes my phone runs out of memory.

Picsel is supposedly only for Samsung phones, but there are a few ported copies floating around on the internet.

Finally!

[Askmum]

Yes, finally! I've been testing Minimo when it still was in development, and apart from it's problems (especially the ghastly sluggishness) I liked it a lot. It rendered much better than other browsers for PDAs.
Now I am forced to use Opera (at a price) together with Pocket Internet Explorer. Both have their +'es and -'es, but neither one is absolutely superior. There are websites that render nicely in Opera and don't in PIE and vice versa.
That's my whole beef with current mobile browsers. There just isn't one product that's superior to the other.

Alas for the stop on Firefox development. I really need a proper email reader on my PDA.

Re:Wonder if it's the same as MicroB on the N800..

[Anonymous Coward]

Nokia is (for some reason) using Opera 8 so it's no wonder modern sites doesn't work. Opera 8 is so 2003. Opera 9 (love the 9.5 alpha) is so much more 2007. :-)

It's FREE

[kyshtock]

Free as in free beer. Download and install.

Great

[MrCopilot]

Just Great now I'll have to use Pocket Ice Weasel.

minimo on linux

[bl8n8r]

They've had minimo for Windows for quite a while. I've built it for ARMedslack but it was a friggin nightmare and never did work quite right. Hopefully the changes will improve that process.

Good for them

[sootman]

I looked at browsers for my Axim last year and concluded that they all mostly suck. Sadly, Minimo was the worst of the three I tried. (Others were MSIE & Opera.) It didn't run too great, didn't render pages too great (on my 640x480 screen, some elements were tiny, some were huge), it ran slow, and slowed down the whole PDA after it had been launched, even when not in use. Resetting the PDA was the only fix. I look forward to seeing what they come up with. Maybe they'll even address my biggest gripe--no browser on a PDA (that I've seen) really works like a desktop browser--I can't save pages, images, linked files, etc. My Axim is better in every way (more CPU, more RAM, more storage) than the Dell with Win95 and Netscape 3 that I had a decade ago but is still less capable in so many ways.

(Slightly OT) The zoom-in-zoom-out method of Safari on the iPhone works OK but it is, in fact, an inelegant workaround to make up for the fact that most web pages aren't designed the way web pages were designed to be designed--to let the content flow and resize based on the user's environment. Zooming works OK if your site is cut up into pieces with tables or DIVs but it really sucks for totally unstyled sites. I'd really rather just have a powerful, flexible browser.

May be some time late

[Pipaman]

Opera has released its mobile version a long time ago.

Not this one

[Kelson]

You're thinking of either the desktop version of Opera, or Opera Mini, both of which are free. The GP was talking about Opera Mobile, which does indeed cost US $24.

Minimo

[Noiser]

I'm not an avid mobile device user, but i did have a rather nice experience with Minimo once. A relative of mine was bragging about his brand new Mobile Windows device at a family meal recently and showed off how well it works with GPS and connects to the neighbours' WiFi.

Well, i'm not a fan of IE and Windows, so i asked him to let me play around with the device a little and immediately headed to getfirefox.com. There i quickly found Minimo. The installation was rather slow and the application took forever to load in comparison to mobile IE, but it opened websites very well. The really amazing part is that it opened websites in Hebrew perfectly, while IE was an utter failure at rendering bidirectional Hebrew text. So, quite surprisingly, i had a strong point convincing people to switch to Mozilla and free software in general.

So - maybe Minimo was half-baked, but it probably was a great experiment.

(To be fair, regular PC Windows version of IE handles Hebrew well.)