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

[Brian Gordon]

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.

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

[pas256]

The question is, why even both with the carriers... Firefox should be going straight to the manufacturers!

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

[Naughty Bob]

Yup, that's the downside. And one I can accept, though others might feel differently.

I value my privacy, but have judged that, so long as I avoid sending sensitive passwords, bank card data etc., I am happy for a bunch of Swedish nerds to have access to my mobile browsing data. A damn sight happier than letting my phone company have the same data.

Re:As of now

[X0563511]

They don't need to drop it and switch, what would be nice is if they allowed the user to put it on.

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

[stbill79]

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

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

[laffer1]

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.

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.

Because

[ArchieBunker]

companies think that free=no good.

Re:Because

[Jeff DeMaagd]

But if you give software away for free, that makes a more competitive and consumer friendly market! Why do something silly like that when vendor lock-in is such an easy and lucrative way to run a business?

They don't necessarily make more money being consumer friendly, and cutting a little on costs here might net them more expenses in the long run. They don't make money by allowing the market being competitive. Both are benefits to the consumer, not the service provider. The article explains more along this line.

Re:Because

[RLiegh]

Not exactly, it's because mobile phone companies think that having complete platform control is a lot more important than allowing an open browser to upset their applecart.

And from their perspective -they're right. If you don't control the application you want to make sure that the people who do control it are either under your influence, or have similar goals. Open source isn't under their influence, and the goals of open source are diametrically opposite of the manufacturers'.

Re:Because

[Billly Gates]

The consumers are left out of this equation.

Many will think enough is enough with paying $3 for some crappy midi file for a ring tone and want to run their phone like their pcs.

I for one refuse to buy high end phones for this reason. I want to run my own apps and not pay through the nose for their drm infested crappy software.

If you read my posts I am in favor of the free market and not some gnu zealot but when a company dictates how to use something I paid for and halts innovation I get mad.

I am not the only one and a truly free phone will attract all the developers and therefore bring all teh apps and cool games. After this their business model is done. You can't just lock a whole market up. Eventually someone like lets say google and their andriod sdk will come along and provide serious competition.

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.

Re:Because

[vux984]

Eventually someone like lets say google and their andriod sdk will come along and provide serious competition.

Yeah, lets all bow down at the alter of google. They'll just force us to view ads while data mining our conversations and text messages. I'd sure like to get in on that.

Re:Because

[erroneus]

...even so, it's only a matter of time.

Since recently there has been a ruling to the effect of preventing carriers from locking out equipment not sold by them, there will be pure equipment makers who will find generic software offerings such as FireFox mobile quite attractive when adding value to their hardware offerings. The first one to shed their fear of control loss will be the first one to find that giving the consumer what they want often leads to consumer loyalty and enduring profits.

Re:Because

[Miseph]

I think it's a sign that capitalism is deeply and critically flawed that things are turning out the way they are. It's not a good sign for the free market that we have to resort to socialism in order to restore basic economic and consumer freedoms.

It's a sinking ship you cling to, just in case you hadn't noticed.

Re:Because

[garett_spencley]

"I for one refuse to buy high end phones for this reason. I want to run my own apps and not pay through the nose for their drm infested crappy software.

If you read my posts I am in favor of the free market and not some gnu zealot but when a company dictates how to use something I paid for and halts innovation I get mad." - Billy Gates

I love the irony.

Re:Because

[bgillespie]

But that's what the bottom line is, that's what the expression means.

I understand that that's the common usage of the expression, but it can also be used to mean "the deciding factor", which is what I intended. All I'm suggesting is that in an ideal world perhaps money wouldn't be the only thing that corporations considered when making business decisions.

Re:Because

[Solandri]

I think it's a sign that capitalism is deeply and critically flawed that things are turning out the way they are. It's not a good sign for the free market that we have to resort to socialism in order to restore basic economic and consumer freedoms.

No, it's not a sign that capitalism is "deeply and critically flawed." Capitalism works most of the time. There are certain localized areas of the solution space where capitalism doesn't work. This includes the Prisoner's Dilemma (where individuals acting in their own best interests arrive at the worst possible outcome for all), the Tragedy of the Commons (where individuals acting in their own best interests arrive at the worst possible outcome for everyone else), and a monopoly (where an individual, company, or cartel controls enough of the market to thwart free market economics). Phone carrier lock-in is just a localized monopoly.

It's highly unusual for any solution to be effective 100% of the time in all possible cases. So it shouldn't come as a surprise that capitalism doesn't work in certain cases. The key is to recognize those cases, and enact legislation which makes up for those shortcomings (e.g. environmental protection laws, fisheries management, anti-trust laws). Damning capitalism entirely because it fails in certain limited cases is throwing the baby out with the bathwater, and about as ideologically boneheaded as believing capitalism is always the best solution. What's needed are laws assuring the phone carrier market operates efficiently - allow people to port their phone numbers, allow non-vendor hardware to operate over the networks, and a cell-phone version of network neutrality where any non-vendor apps can run over the network.

I haven't quite decided yet about multi-year contracts since they are a legitimately chosen by customers - the problem being that apparently 99% of US customers would rather amortize their purchase and pay more, rather than pay the phone costs lump sum up front for less. At this point the only contract legislation I would support is forcing the telecos to give me a discount once I am out of contract or if I bring my own phone, since then they are no longer subsidizing the phone cost with my monthly fee. As it is right now, I pay the same monthly fee as someone whose monthly fee is subsidizing a $500 phone, even though I bought and paid for my phone myself.

Re:Because

[Koiu Lpoi]

*clap clap clap*

You win the gold star for today. A man talks about the clear problems with capitalism, and you turn him around and say "BUT COMMUNISM IS BAD." It's called a straw man. You can't argue against the center by saying he belongs to the edge.

Then again, you won over somebody, as you got modded up.

Don't forget the iPhone

[stokessd]

There's certainly room for it on the iPhone as well. Safari is all nice, but I would like adblock on it, especially on the edge network when every byte counts.

Sheldon

Re:Don't forget the iPhone

[pebs]

There's certainly room for it on the iPhone as well. Safari is all nice, but I would like adblock on it, especially on the edge network when every byte counts.

NoScript would also help in that respect.

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:Don't forget the iPhone

[thsths]

There's certainly room for it on the iPhone as well. The fact that the iPhone is the "most open" platform say it all. Phones are a convenient way for the networks to control customers. This also means that they are not enabling technology. I am confident that Firefox will change this, but it may take some time.

Just another reason to unlock your phone

[sw155kn1f3]

Period. You can't stop software spreading if customers want it.

It's important to read the article

[93 Escort Wagon]

One reason this walled garden approach benefits cellular operators is that they get paid both by subscribers and by content providers. With open Internet access, only subscribers pay. Another benefit is that their approach reduces use of limited 3G bandwidth, meaning carriers don't have to build a more robust network. I don't know if the blogger is confused himself or is deliberately muddying the waters - but very little of his argument applies to Firefox at all (even tangentially). He is hop-scotching around (such as the quote included above), making it hard to argue against because he seems to be jumping back and forth randomly between about ten different subjects.

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.

Their phones??

[Billly Gates]

I thought we owned all own phones like we do computers? Why can't we run our own software? Or develop software for them?

Can you imagine living in a world where you could not develop programs for your own computer?

Fuck em!

Seriously port firefox to andriod only. If enough developers switch to a platform that allows them to compete and run their own software the users will follow. I know many here hate Java but why can't we live in a world that is free?

Would you rather own a locked down phone or one where all the free apps on the internet run on? I would pick the latter.

Consumers run WIndows over Linux and MacOSX because its where the apps are at. The phone companies are going to create the ultimate competitor if they are not careful and dictate to the rest of us what to use.

Yet another reason...

[bcrowell]

...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.

Symbian OS?

[Evan Meakyl]

I am glad that Firefox is availaible on the Windows & linux phone, but why nothing is (seems?) to be done regarding the Symbian OS? (wikipedia says that it is "the leading OS in the 'smart mobile device' market. Statistics published February 2007 showed that Symbian OS had a 67% share of the 'smart mobile device' market,"

Does someone have some information about the "why?" (I know you can tell me that if I am willing, I can start developping it myself, but actually I have to much projects to cope with...)

And another question: I own a Nokia E-61. If Firefox is not planed for Symbian OS, I am willing to install Linux Mobile on it. Can someone give me a pointer to what I should do to do this?

Re:Symbian OS?

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:Symbian OS?

[Linux Ate My Dog!]

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.

Re:Firefox that cannot connect is next to useless

[Naughty Bob]

I've never experienced that, but I am in the UK, which from what I can tell has a much healthier mobile phone market.

That would drive me nuts though. Can you download 'offending' apps to a computer then transfer it locally?

I am angry just thinking about that error message.

its all about control, of your money

[hAckz0r]

I have a Treo and use Sprint for my network. The browser they supply is rigged so that I can not download anything bigger than a couple of k in size. Not even a full SlashDot web page! This prevents me from downloading any media files that I did not purchase from them and also any applications I might like to run on it. They are attempting a complete lockin situation by virtue of keeping me from using anything I don't buy from them. I have news for them, I WONT buy from them because they won't let me use what I want when I want. In the final analysis I still transfer what I want to listen to and/or read on my device, they just make it harder than it needs to be.

I for one would welcome Firefox on all my mobile devices as along as it lets me download what I want.

Opera != just a browser. Firefox can't compete

[cybernanga]

Opera mini is more than just a browser. They have a proxy server that grabs the page, and re-renders it to suit your phone's screen. That causes a very slight delay, while their server re-renders the page, but it saves a heck of a lot of bandwidth. All images are resized. Long lists are collapsed etc.

I'm not sure that Firefox will be able to compete in this arena without creating a proxy server system of their own. I'm not against them trying, I just want to make it clear to those of you who haven't used Opera Mini, that it is more than just a browser.

Anyone else have any thoughts on this?

it works in the rest of the world

[Colin Smith]

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.

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)

Google filters mobile search results

[Jamie Lokier]

I'm on the 3 network in the UK. The internet facility is quite good: we have HSDPA, advertised as "up to 2.8Mbit/s". I've seen about 2Mbit/s at best, however download rates are sensitive to latency too. The latency is extremely variable, anything from 150ms up to 30 seconds for a ping, independent of signal quality. Whether it's usable or not is therefore also rather variable. Still, when it works, it's quite nice.

I pay a flat rate of approx £10 (US $20) to fetch up to 3GB/month, which I've never reached on it. Therefore, I'm quite happy with the price, and I don't worry at all about data charges.

It's not a walled garden: the whole internet is accessible. That's nice.

But when I visit good old Google, at their normal URLs, I find the search results are filtered by Google. I'm not sure, it may be that Google's "Safe Search" feature is switched on when using a mobile. But I notice that there are no settings to turn it off: I'm stuck with filtered results, whether I like them or not. And there's no text saying the results are filtered.

Another thing I noticed is that the BBC News page redirects to a "mobile-optimised" version which doesn't have what I want on it. That's very annoying; I would really like to be able to visit the normal page.

I wouldn't be surprised if this has nothing to do with the mobile network, and is done by the web sites themselves detecting a mobile client. It is very annoying, especially when the site in question provides no way to access the normal site.

-- Jamie