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....

[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....

[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...

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?

[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: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*

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: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.