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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."
companies think that free=no good.
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Period. You can't stop software spreading if customers want it.
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So let's assume that the title of his little rant is indicative of what he thought he was writing about. Somehow he seems to be drawing the conclusion that, sans an open-source web browser, people aren't allowed to browse websites of their own choosing! I'd love to see Firefox on mobile platforms; but really - even my friends with Windows Mobile phones are checking their Gmail; I see them looking at all sorts of odd pages; and I have never heard them complain that their carrier won't let them visit any arbitrary page. I do hear them complaining about the crappy internet experience they're having, due to the poor design of the browser; but that's a completely different subject (and while Firefox could potentially address that, Safari already does - and it's got nothing to do with the openness of the browser, per se, anyway).
When the web was first getting onto mobile phones, I realize people weren't given free reign in their browsing habits - but c'mon, that was three or four years ago.
#DeleteChrome
I'm not a loyal anything user, but I really dislike the locked-down American cellphone situation. I'm not using my buying power to support apple/at&t for their nazi control over their device (even if you jailbreak it, you paid for the lock and so supported it) or any other platform, including opera mobile. Obviously I can't get by without a cellphone, but I just have a basic $20 KRAZR, no smart phone nonsense, and no putting $500 in the pockets of someone using it to get more locked down phones into the hands of the public.
...not to use a cell phone to browse the web. But I didn't really need another reason. The screen is way too small. Almost no web pages are designed for cell phones. There's no mouse or keyboard. I don't need another monthly bill.
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I for one would welcome Firefox on all my mobile devices as along as it lets me download what I want.
The problem is that Symbian, in C++, is deeply unpleasant to develop for, and very different to Palm, Windows CE or really, anything else.
The documentation is atrocious - there aren't many examples in it, and as opposed to Win32, where you can usually figure out how to use a function from the MSDN library's description of it, trying to do that will generally result in something that fails in an obscure way. As a rule the only sure way to find out how something is done is to find someone else who's already done it and try to figure out what they did that makes it work.
Symbian has only recently ported stdlib to it properly, in what I presume is an act of desperation to try and get people to develop for it. V9 solves the problem where all applications had to be DLLs with no global storage allowed, but it also adds a particularly paranoid code-signing system where your app has to be signed before it is possible to run it outside of the emulator.
That's been my experience, anyway. However - there is a whitepaper on how Opera was ported to Symbian. I can't find a freely accessible version of it right now, but it's a fascinating read and it illustrates full well why porting Mozilla would be very, very difficult.
I do not know why you have been modded -1. I have developed in Symbian when I worked for Nokia, and it is exatly as you describe: deeply unpleasant.
They don't need to drop it and switch, what would be nice is if they allowed the user to put it on.
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Agreed - AT&T is a definite negative to the US tech market. I'd say slice 'n dice them back up into 10 competing companies, but in the least they need to be restricted from controlling both the ISP/backbone/cable business and also a large part of the wireless system. The wireless carriers will not have their cake and eat it to. Prices have not come down while technology has improved leaps and bounds - in the US, we all still pay at least $40-$50/month for basic phone service. There are two markets and the wireless carriers cannot control both simultaneously: Either I want basic phone service at true cost (see third world countries for reference) of about $5-$10 for metered calls/text without all the bells and whistles. OR I want Japanese/S.Korea style access, availability, and speed from the platform of my choice, and the wireless carrier is nothing more than a link to the internet, not knowing whether I'm connecting with a phone, pc, or some clever hybrid not manufactured and 'approved' by the wireless corp. I should not be paying over $70/month for basic phone, text messages, very restricted internet access at special 'hotspots' or reduced bandwidth. I'm soon going to be expecting
Capitalism is just buyers and sellers. If the buyers keep on buying crap from the sellers, they'll just keep being sold it. Especially when there are alternatives available.
Deleted
I realize this won't come out as I intend. I have not been following the development of the mobile version of Firefox, but have they designed it to work in a low memory environment? Many people complain about the memory usage on systems with over a gigabyte of memory. Firefox proponents claim this is due to caching; provided this is true, can the browser run efficiently with almost zero memory for caching?
I'm shocked they didn't have a company lined up before the effort to port was started.
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