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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."
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
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.
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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 desktop versions of mainstream browsers nowadays have memory consumption in roughly the same order of magnitude.
Also consider that browsing on a as-smart-as-it-can-be device will still be lighter than browsing on a full blown computer.
You don't even need tabs to get that piece of information you need off the net, log out and move along.
When ideas fail, words become very handy.
What's more, 2010 means another iteration of Moore's Law.
Which means, taking the iPhone as a benchmark, we'll have phones with 256 megs of RAM and 1.2 ghz processors.
It's been awhile since I've touched anything with less than 512 megs on it, but I know I used to run Firefox (before it was called Firefox -- remember Phoenix?) on that little RAM, with plenty of other programs open. Most phones are designed to run exactly one app at once.
So, extrapolating all of that -- I'd say they could do absolutely no coding, other than developing a skin and ensuring that it compiles for ARM, and still have a usable product.
But maybe that's your point -- by the time they get their act together, it should be possible to simply put Linux on an iPhone and run the desktop version of Firefox.
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
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
Google Chromes V8 engine can compile to x86 and ARM targets. ARM is in the majority of phones. I don't think it'll take Google very long to get Chrome "good enough". Infact, I'm pretty sure they'll release Android with Chrome on the HTC "Dream", to be released in Q4.
Mozilla's Minimo running on my Windows Mobile-based phone already runs with tabbed browsing... Just because we're used to ridiculously high-resolution screens doesn't mean we should forget that early computer screens had lower resolutions than many current phone screens...
"Go to CNN [for a] spell-checked, fact-checked summary" -- CmdrTaco
That'll be sync with their desktop Mozilla browser.
Has anyone else noticed that every six months Mozilla announces that they're working on a mobile browser?
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