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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.'"
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.
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.
The theory of relativity doesn't work right in Arkansas.
I wish they would carry those lessons over to firefox sometime soon.
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?
"As God is my witness, I thought turkeys could fly." A. Carlson
Perhapses that knowledge could allow them to reduce the footprint of the full sized version, maybe? Hopefully?
"You will do foolish things, but do them with enthusiasm." - S. G. Colette
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.
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.
"A witty saying proves nothing." - Voltaire
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.
This isn't surprising considering Google's recent purchase of Mozilla, and the search giant's new focus on mobile with their Google Phone.
If you want news from today, you have to come back tomorrow.
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."
I suggest they call it:
MObile FirefOx
Then, we can abbreviate that to Mofo.
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.
Apple: Iphone burns up in owner's pocket, flames burn up to his neck
...followed shortly by...
First slashdot post:
"Liar Liar pants on..."
"Was he running FireFox?"
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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.
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
There is no "disagree" moderation, and troll, flamebait and overrated are not valid substitutes
Firefox on mobile devices? Great, but where do I get 2GB of ram for my treo?
RelevantElephants: A Somatic WebComic...
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.
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.
"That which does not kill us makes us stranger." -Trevor Goodchild
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
.sig: No such file or directory
You're referring to PIE (Pocket Internet Explorer. Tastes bad, not to be confused with Apple PIE or Apricot PIE).
... wait a minute... can I get it for Windows XP?
Details page: http://www.microsoft.com/windowsmobile/microsoftprograms/iemobile.mspx.
It's ultra basic. No popup support, no Flash, no
For a site about things like basic rights, Slashdot users sure do like to censor "dissent".
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).
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.