Mozilla Hitting 'Brick Walls' Getting Firefox on Phones

meteorit writes "Mozilla has been working on a mobile version of Firefox since last year, and is now looking to repeat the success of Firefox on the PC. Although development seems not to have been completed, it is known that informal negotiations have already started with mobile network operators. Firefox Mobile is scheduled to be launched by the end of the year and the inaugural version will be compatible with the Linux and Windows Mobile operating systems. Work is already underway to determine what the browser's UI will look like. In the meantime those negotiations seem to be hitting 'brick walls', as cellphone operators resist the intrusion of the open web onto their platforms."

Comments

As of now

[Corpuscavernosa]

Opera is the king of mobile browsers IMHO. IE, as expected, is marginal at best. On my Windows Mobile 6 phone, Opera cruises along.

As a loyal Firefox user, I'd LOVE to see a mobile version if it can compete with the speed of Opera.

Re:As of now

[Naughty Bob]

As a loyal Firefox user, I'd LOVE to see a mobile version if it can compete with the speed of Opera.

With Opera (mini and, i think, mobile), the pages you request are sent via Opera's servers, where they are put through some kind of compression. The upshot is that not only is Opera quicker, but I can visit almost twice the number of pages for my money. In practice, given that you can set it to not download pictures, I get about 3 times more pages-per-buck than when I use the browser the phone comes with.

I could seriously become a fanboy at this rate.

Re:As of now

[nxtw]

Opera Mobile is a regular web browser that does not go through Opera's servers. It'll use your device's connection settings, so it could end up connecting through your wireless provider's WAP/HTTP gateway if your device is set up to use it. (The rendering engine in the current version of Opera Mobile is old - the PC & Wii versions are newer)

Opera Mini is a completely different product.

Re:As of now

[zlogic]

Some forums, powered by vBulletin, are over 120 kilobytes per page (without images), probably has to do something with badly formatted HTML and a lot of Javascript. Opera's servers compress these to about 6-8 KB, also without images. That's more than 10 times less traffic.

Re:As of now

[Doogie5526]

I don't really see why a central proxy is significantly faster than a phone with a well-designed name resolver plus a well-designed browser, and a web server which supports Content-Encoding:gzip.

Never used Opera on a cellphone, but from what I've read, the proxy will scale down the images before sending to the browser. No need to download the full res if you're viewing on a tiny screen. The browser does give you the option to download the full res version if requested, but i'm sure 90% of the time you're just using the images for navigation.

I'm sure it's obvious by now, but scaling down the images will reduce the bandwidth way more than gzipping them. Also, the proxy could add gzip compression even if the web server doesn't use it.

Re:As of now

[enemi]

it uses their own proprietary markup language which leaves out all the data that is not cellphone-worthy (flash javascript whatnot), compresses the text quite a bit and compresses the images for the tiny display. this is where you save the most euro/megabyte

Re:As of now

[D4MO]

The amusing thing is that the most "open" platform at the moment is windows mobile. Even if you get a subsidised / locked one, it's easy to modify. There's a very active ROM scene (though it's a legal grey area), you can install whatever you like, and write what you want for it in C++ or .Net compact framework. I have skype, jabber client, remote desktop, vnc.

Getting symbian updates, even on unlocked phone is entirely at the whim of the manufacture, which usually doesn't happen.

But yeah, the cost of an unlocked phone is prohibitive.

Re:As of now

[hkmwbz]

Opera Mini does support SSL. The connection between the phone and the proxy is encrypted as well.

Re:As of now

[hkmwbz]

Opera is Norwegian, and Norway has extremely strict privacy laws. Opera has been in business for more than ten years, and is definitely trustworthy.

Re:As of now

[VGPowerlord]

Unless servers normally don't compress their responses ... hm. I should reread the Apache documentation.

Apache does not compress by default. You have to install mod_deflate and set up the DEFLATE output handler first. The sample instructions are a bit simplistic, but they should work.

As someone else noted in one of the sibling replies, gzipping images isn't going to get you anywhere... the Opera proxies actually downgrade the image quality (and size? I'm not sure, I've never used Opera Mini) to improve speed.

Re:As of now

[nxtw]

Opera Mobile is a Web browser that renders HTML/CSS and does JavaScript. It connects to web servers directly if a WAP/HTTP gateway/proxy is not configured. Pages are fully rendered on the device; it's written in native code (C/C++) and is almost certainly based on the 8.6 version of the Opera rendering code. (Opera for Wii uses something close to the in-beta 9.5 code, Opera for Windows/Unix/OS X is at release version 9.26, and Opera Mobile has been at 8.65 for awhile.)

Opera Mini is a Web browser that renders specially processed pages from Opera's proxy server to reduce rendering & download time. It's written in J2ME (Java 2 Mobile Edition).

Re:As of now

[mjtg]

I am happy for a bunch of Swedish nerds to have access to my mobile browsing data

Actually, they're Norwegian nerds.

Re:As of now

[bunratty]

No, they have not designed it to work in a low memory environment. The minimum memory requirement for mobile Firefox is the same as for the desktop version: 64 MB. That means that mobile Firefox will be limited to running on smartphones at first. In a few years, even typical mobile phones should come with enough memory to run Firefox. I would think the bigger problems would be the small screen and small keyboard.

It is common to see complaints about Firefox's memory usage on Slashdot, but in reality very few people (out of 140 million users) experience serious memory issues. On the MozillaZine forums, discussion of serious memory problems is almost non-existent. Caching will not cause Firefox to use a gigabyte of memory, and neither will fragmentation as far as I'm aware. I don't think anyone knows exactly why Firefox mysteriously uses many hundreds of megabytes of memory for no reason for some users. The users who complain about the problem think it's a problem every Firefox user experiences, so they don't seem to feel the need to explain the details of the problem. I used Firefox 3 beta 3 on Windows for a week, and it was using only 150 MB when I closed it (the peak was 250 MB). Now that many smartphones come with 512 MB of RAM, it doesn't look like lack of RAM will be a problem for Firefox except on low-end smartphones in the near future.

Re:Don't forget the iPhone

[abigor]

Well, Adblock for Safari obviously exists: http://safariadblock.sourceforge.net/ , so I guess it's just a matter of Apple allowing 3rd party software installs. I don't own an iPhone, so I'm not really sure what the situation is there.

Re:Because

[bgillespie]

Should the bottom line always be profits?

Practically speaking, of course, it always is. But in the end, it all comes down to a class war between the wealthy and the not-as-wealthy in society. Anti-competitive trends in a market mean more profits for the "company", which translates primarily to more profits for the wealthy executives and investors associated with the company. Competitive trends, on the other hand, mean better value for the people who use the good or service, which translates to a smaller benefit for a larger group of people. When the wealthy executives and investors are making the choices, clearly the expected outcome is the one we're seeing here.

It seems to me that we're not necessarily disagreeing here.

Image recompression

[tepples]

I don't really see why a central proxy is significantly faster than a phone with a well-designed name resolver plus a well-designed browser, and a web server which supports Content-Encoding:gzip. Gzip cannot recompress GIF, JPEG, and PNG images at reduced quality and file size, which I'm suspecting that some proxies do.

Unless servers normally don't compress their responses A lot of servers don't compress responses out of the box.

Re:Vapor Cannot Hit A Brick Wall

[VGPowerlord]

But even on Windows, Safari is twice as fast as Firefox, and Safari for Windows is an 8MB download (including Mac graphics libraries) while Firefox is 22MB.

You might want to check your figures.

For PCs:
Firefox 2.0.0.12 installer: 5.75 MB (6,029,648 bytes)
Safari 3.x Beta installer: 15.6 MB (16,398,632 bytes)