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Mozilla Is Eyeing Your Phone
Slatterz writes "Mozilla is planning to develop a browser for mobile phones by 2010. Mitchell Baker, chairman of the Mozilla Foundation, has been laying out her plans for the organisation over the next two years. Baker also committed to expanding the role of Firefox and building on its market share, while developing new browser technology such as the Aurora project. Mozilla has already stated that it is working on a mobile version of Firefox, but has never set a timeframe for release."
They will be left so far behind.
Apple's safari is already an amazing browser for mobile phones.
I'm sure that Google won't take as long as 2010 to come out with a mobile version of Chrome.
Opera might not be the best browser for mobile phones, but it's pretty decent.
IMHO I think Mozilla needs to get their mobile browser out a little bit earlier than that. Of course it's a good strategy to not release the software until it's ready, but how far behind are they ready to get?
I wonder how it will compete with mighty opera mini? Opera uses an online server to cache the images before sending them to you to save you money. Firefox is going to need similar innovation to make a dent
when opera mobile is already out there and working fantastically? I very much doubt firefox will get its memory usage down enough to compete.
I am trolling
By 2010, there would be mobile phones/devices that would have a larger screen resolution and more processing power (and RAM). As technologies advance, the problem is getting less and less about cramming info on a small screen and more about delivering the same featureset of the desktop variants to a mobile device.
So I guess beyond 2010, they should just port the desktop code to whatever platform mobile devices run on.
That is unless we don't try to dream and reinvent the simple web browsing so that it would take all your PC's resources and ask for your firstborn.
How about a PROPER headline such as "Mozilla to develop handset browser by 2010"?
Can stand the pseudo-catchy and privacy-innuendo-style headlines anymore.
Seriously, how? It's freaking slow!
Glad to hear that they are developing the Aurora project. Very interesting piece of software, you can find the home page at http://www.adaptivepath.com/aurora/
How many projects to get Mozilla on mobiles have they started so far? Whatever happened to MiniMo?
I suspect this'll happen when mobiles have enough memory to just run Firefox.
http://rocknerd.co.uk
I hate to pop the Anglocentric bubble, but Access Netfront and Picsel Browser have the Far East and Asian markets (carrier and OEMs) stitched up between them. North America and Europe are already fairly small markets in comparison, and the segment of users who can and will install a 3rd party browser is pretty much you, me, and Bob over there.
If you were blocking sigs, you wouldn't have to read this.
The summary is misleading, it should say "Mozilla is planning to develop a[n another] browser for mobile phones by 2010.", because Minimo (Mini Mozilla) has existed for years: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minimo
I've even used it on my PPC, but found that it isn't very good, especially compared to Opera Mobile.
Deus est fatalis
I've also got an N800 running the Mozilla-based browser. It's fabulous!
The N800 also runs Opera, which is slightly faster than the Mozilla browser, but Mozilla is running all the JavaScript that Opera is discarding. The Mozilla browser supports Flash 9 too. All in all it's a nice piece of work.
The N800 is 800x480 pixels on a 4.1 inch screen, which is just enough to browse "real" websites in the way they were designed to be browsed. With some phones now approaching this (e.g. the HTC Touch HD is 800x480 on a 3.8 inch screen), it would be great to see Mozilla on the phone itself.
Unfortunately, two years is too long to wait.
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If Mozilla is eyeing for the phone - doesn't that make it an eyePhone?
*TA-DUM* *CHRASH* *THUD*
Thank you, thank you, I'm here all week. Try the fish.
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
"2010" ? Why the hell "2010" ?!?
There's already MinoMo which is *already running* currently on my Openmoko. Also running on Windows CE and Linux PDAs.
There was even a recent announcement on /. about a soon-to-be-released "Firefox"-branded mobile browser descendant of that previous effort.
Now what is this 2010 time frame ? Maybe by then they will announce a separate brand of software specially targeting mobile platforms (FireColibri, FireFennec, SeaShrimp or something along these lines with Debian simultaneously launching the corresponding de-branded IceGerbil ?)
But Gecko-based mobile browser are already available.
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
The new mozilla based mobile, based on current mozilla techno + some additions for mobile, is already available in alpha.
https://wiki.mozilla.org/Fennec
This is like Firefox with the ui completely redone.
It will also support extensions.
2010 is just 1.5 year away so having a non beta build for 2010 doesn't seem unrealistic.
I guess some optimisations made for mobile environnement will benefit everybody (like the optimization done for Firefox)
(and there's already a tracemonkey javascript for arm so this will be fast)
I'm in no doubt it will be a great software.
The only thing uncertain is if it will be shipped by default on some devices...
...I iz pwning ur fone......with a tiny lizard?
teleny, friend of cats.
Why would this take 2 years? Can't they put a team on it and crank something out in a month or two? In two years I'll have already discarded three more handsets.
If Opera (who makes a fast browser with no visible memory/cpu problems) can't make a mobile browser that doesn't die on "out of memory" on *every* page on my HTC SmartPhone, then what chance does Mozilla (the king of memory leaks and runaway CPU) have? I'd sure love to see a lean, mean, mobile Mozilla, but I have some serious doubts if they can pull it off.
The latest Opera mobile truly is unusable on my Windows Mobile smart phone (due to the out-of-memory-thing) which was quite disappointing to me. I've yet to come across a good mobile browsing experience, other than on an iPhone (which I won't buy due to price, lack of open app distribution, and insane data plans from Rogers). Sigh...
Love many, trust a few, do harm to none.
Since you can only view one page (or tab, if you will) at a time on a mobile browser, the whole threading issue that actually makes Chrome fairly unique pretty much goes away.
Not really. There is a radical new concept afoot involving back and forward arrows.
Not possible, not with the bloat that is Firefox ("the lightweight counterpart to Mozilla").
I remembering hearing that argument a decade ago, and it's as false now as it was then.
Why? Well PCs will always have more processing power, more RAM, more storage, faster network connections, larger screens, and most importantly more power.
You don't seem to appreciate that the code written for PCs that you intend to port from will become more and more resource hungry, and therefore you will always have the same problem.
Moore's law gives you no help but probably hinders you, as there is physically more code you need to rewrite to get it resource-friendly enough!
You could use the old versions which have a smaller resource footprint, but they also don't contain the features you desire...
It's pretty hard to find a device that can't run some form of WebKit browser these days
Nintendo DS can run community apps with the Games n' Music card by Datel, but it also has only 4 MB of RAM, or 12 MB if you plug the extra stick of RAM that comes with Opera into the GBA slot. Sony's PSP has 32 MB of RAM, but you need to already have a modded PSP in order to mod yours to run community apps.
Will it feature the "AwesomeBar"?
Not interested.
Has anyone else noticed that every six months Mozilla announces that they're working on a mobile browser?
Coder's Stone: The programming language quick ref for iPad
I've used Nokia's Webkit based browser, Opera Mini and Opera, Pocket IE and the iPhone's Safari browser and one thing is quite obvious to me. You can't replicate all the functionality of today's web without a mouse like device. The iPhone comes closest, but the inability to move just the mouse pointer to hover over things means many menu systems and some Flash games aren't usable. IMHO, solve the mouse problem and you solve mobile browsers. The technical ability to do stuff will come as mobiles catch up to PCs, but there will always be a "mobile web" and a "desktop web" until the interface catches up.
I got my MBP with Tiger. Installed Leopard fairly shortly after it came out. 10.5 was pretty sucky in terms of stability, but 10.5.1 was groovy. Boot times are fairly consistent with Tiger boot times, maybe a couple of seconds slower than Tiger.
My wife's HP Vista laptop OTOH...egads. And that's even after removing all the HP shitware that comes with it.
You know, when FF3 was about to be released, I kept hearing how improvements in the renderer would lead to it being more viable on low-power devices and eventually lead to a cell phone port. Well. I'm typing this on an old machine I keep around. Since the fan on my newer box is having issues I'm stuck with it for a while. It's about 8 years old, so it's still more powerful than my smart phone. And it's got a gig of RAM. For a long time I used Firefox 1.5 on it without any problems. And when I installed 3.0 on it, I regretted it. It's just not usable.
I don't know what kind of hardware the typical firefox developer has. But if 3.0 is any indication, they're not testing it with low-end configurations.
After all, it "duplicates functionality"
The post that's referenced in the article is available on mozilla's newsgroup and was Mitchell just asking for feedback on our 2010 goals. We're still in the process of fleshing out those goals and we're trying to figure out how mobile plays a role in them.
Our mobile involvement is something that's going to take a while to get spun up, but it's not something that will take as long as people think it will take here.
First of all, Mozilla is the only browser solution that has a fully open source browser that's flexible and is multi-platform. Our code works on x86, x86_64, ARM, ppc, etc. We have the entire browser infrastructure in place as well - history, bookmarks, UI rendering, full networking stack - everything. And our engine is completely competitive in terms of our ability to execute on mobile platforms.
That being said it's important to understand that WebKit is not a browser. It's an HTML rendering part - an important part but everything else that goes around the browser is also huge and complex and hard to build. And everyone who has embedded WebKit has either had to borrow someone else's or build their own. So everyone has to re-invest to get the entire browser infrastructure that we already include. WebKit people have generally invested earlier, but we'll get there faster with a better solution that's tested against the real web.
Chrome is interesting too. It's essentially a big huge win32 app. It uses wininet for a lot of its networking and while the JavaScript engine is portable it's not as portable as Mozilla's new JS engine. Chrome has some neat stuff, but it's going to be a little while before it's up and running on the mac and linux. Chrome is basically built like Netscape 4.x was - native front ends for every platform. Porting pain.
Anyway, it's going to be a fun couple of years and I'm happy that Mozilla will be taking the dive into Mobile. We'll be able to bring a lot of the Firefox experience and community along with us.
We're looking forward to the day when you can walk into a store and ask for the phone with Firefox on it.
FYI Google Android already has a built in browser based on Webkit and has for a long time. I have it running on my phone right now. It's far superior and faster than Opera Mobile.