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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?
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.
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.
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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.
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Competing with Opera Mobile is easy. Opera costs money. If you want to ship Opera with your device, you need to pay for it. It's not much, but it eats away at your profits. In contrast, a Mozilla browser will be free for device manufacturers to install. The real competitor is WebKit. Device manufacturers (e.g. Nokia) already have this ported to small form-factor devices (I can run a WebKit browser on my phone with a 200MHz ARM chip and 32MB of RAM, although the screen is so small that it's not really worth bothering with). Because WebKit's public APIs are cleaner than Gecko's, it's easy for device builders to write a custom browser around it and produce an integrated UI with a rendering engine that other people are spending a lot of money developing.
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How on earth would caching images on an online server save me money? If it very aggressively cached content on the device itself, maybe...
If you meant compressed, that would be a different story entirely. However, I don't think it likely that too many people without an unlimited data plan would be doing much if any browsing on their phones. Still, the bandwidth savings would be a big plus. If I could cut down on the bandwidth usage significantly at the expense of some jpeg artifacting, I'd be all over it when on the road.
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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.
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I downloaded and installed opera mobile for nothing on my phone (well the bandwidth, but no charge for opera itself).
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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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Yes, for individual use. The terms are different if you want to put it on a million devices.
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If Mozilla is eyeing for the phone - doesn't that make it an eyePhone?
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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...
Has anyone else noticed that every six months Mozilla announces that they're working on a mobile browser?
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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.
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.