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Firefox Arrives On Android
Barence writes "Mozilla has launched a 'pre-alpha' version of Firefox for Android smartphones. The mobile version of Firefox, codenamed Fennec, has until now been restricted to Maemo Linux handsets. But following a surge in developer effort, Mozilla has unveiled a build for handsets running Android 2.0 or above. Mozilla is making no guarantees about the browser's stability. 'It will likely not eat your phone, but bugs might cause your phone to stop responding, requiring a reboot,' writes Mozilla developer Vladimir Vukicevic on his blog. 'Memory usage of this build isn't great — in many ways it's a debug build, and we haven't really done a lot of optimization yet. This could cause some problems with large pages, especially on low memory devices like the Droid.'"
How can you have a pre-alpha release? I've always heard Alpha as a "feature preview", where it's not complete and there may be major bugs. Beta was when it was feature complete, but probably contains major bugs. And then Release candidates are for finding major and minor bugs, but should be production ready if none are found... Unless there's another definition I'm not aware of, how can you have pre-alpha code?
If a man isn't willing to take some risk for his opinions, either his opinions are no good or he's no good
Unless you want to help debug and/or develop, I doubt anyone expects or even wants you to.
I like Firefox mobile on my n900. It works pretty well, gives me features not available in the default browser. I have not had memory leak problems with it. However, it does get sluggish if you turn on flash and visit pages with a bunch of flash ads. I should put adblock on it...
Some of us don't like our data being proxied and processed off our phones. I know it's a fine line, but my Android browser has good JS support. Why would I want to throw that away for a little bit of speed?
If a man isn't willing to take some risk for his opinions, either his opinions are no good or he's no good
Probably not.
"I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it." - historian Evelyn Beatrice Hall
Why then would I want to replace my webkit browser with this? I understand this is an Alpha and that bug might be fixed, but again, why would I want to use this over my webkit based browser?
Simple. Once FF works on Android, we can use its superior plugins like AdBlock and NoScript. Anyone with a mobile device will see a huge improvement in browsing performance having these two preventing the dozens of extra retrievals from unrelated servers, ad-farms and other shit.
...large pages like slashdot.org.
LRN 2 SWM
But I made the fatal mistake of putting it into landscape to get a better keyboard, and it brought my phone (Desire) to a crawl. I assume it was trying to rebuild the page layout, something bad happened and displayed a black page.
It Shows promise, it is not usable (obviously) but the UI design seems better than the inbuilt browser. With tabs off screen to the left, and navigation buttons off screen to the right.
Would of been nice to see pinch zoom working, and I am assume that it will (or a custom build that will).
From what I have seen, when it heads into a more stable phase, I would probably swap right away.
Automation - The Car Company Tycoon Game
Because you might want to help make it better by submitting feedback and tracking bugs as it heads into alpha/beta stage and reporting them?
Because tinkering is cool, and it doesn't replace your webkit browser?
This is true that once FF "WORKS" on Android we can use those things. However, TheKidWho makes a valid point. If this isn't going to work great on the Droid and has bugs that are more than likely going to crash the phone and for reboots, Why would I dl this now and risk that. Also valid is gnud with the fact that unless you want to debug and/or develop for this browser I don't see many people going to FF just yet. I personally thought about it but the comment of high memory utilization means it won't work well on my Droid turned me off to it. Once these bugs are worked out though, I will definately be using FF for my dedicated browser.
For that you have applications which serve as intermediate aggrators.
It're still phones, creating a "mobile experience" (quotes to emphasis the literal meaning compared to associated device) experience).
As a sidenote: I love how this sortof interaction is integrating better in an active lifestyle, we've been dreaming up these kindof things for decades as nerds, slaving away from behind bulky phosphorous screens in our basements, in isolation. While now, the "sharing" and reality overlay aspect helps to find, experience, inform and navigate ourselfs, very efficiently in the outside world without dependency on others almost: it's like being guided and navigated through a complex system and be able to interact with it, fully informed, while blindly trusting the experience (after googling it, entering a GPS coordinate, finding points of interests, documenting, sharing, trusting on information on your handheld device while navigating the unknown outside world.) In a way, it's a superhighdefinition (with near infity resolution) entertainment experience: "what do I want to see/experience today?" and you load up your guidance program on your device and navigate the ultra-HD show. It makes DVD look like lowgrade, uninspired and boring, doesn't it? In the ultrahd experience, actors are improvising on the spot. No crummy cliché plotlines, but kindof recurring clichées persist though until you move further away.
This is what, in my eyes, the geekculture has worked for the last decade to integrate this ideal thoughtbased "fantasyworld", the interwebs, into the real world and extrapolate that experience.
I think we can keep recursing like this until someone returns 1
It's not really a valid point, you're both criticizing this as if it were a release.. It's alpha for a reason. Like the GP says, they don't expect nor want people with your expectations to try this build.
As far as why you'd want it at all, well, competition is always a good thing..
sad but true, however I think it's the issue of "which resources".
You have a: serious lag on things loading (processor resource) without adblock and noscript. Meanwhile, you have b: serious ram implications over time if you do have them. I actually forsee the addons being a serious problem on android phones since google still doesn't think people need a "quit" button for their apps, even though most phones get starved on memory specifically because google doesn't understand that you need to give people by default a way to force closed a process.
However, the functionality is stuff that nobody else has down pat. I don't' see anyone else with gestures + adblock equivalent + noscript other than chrome. That and firefox runs more sights properly than chrome does. Safari isn't even worth mention, as it's so feature deprived that it simply runs fast but, well, you know, has no features. The adblock they have isn't even the same, a bit less userfriendly. No noscript available. So what alternatives do people have that are fully functional? none.
I can smell the momentum in the air with Android. I was one of the first people (suckers/early adopters) to buy a G1 handset from T-Mobile. At the time I had a 2G iPhone. Used the G1 for a week, went back to my unlocked, jailbroken iPhone because it had a bunch of great apps that worked well, better form factor, better touchscreen, and much more usable.
Fast forward 16 months, during which time the G1 has sat there and gathered dust. I've finally gotten fed up with my 3G iPhone, the closed ecosystem, the limited email application which is the dealbreaker for me (lack of IMAP IDLE still - msgpush.com is not an option for me, and switching email services to support the technologies Steve Jobs approves of is ridiculous). The other day I decided to blow the dust off my G1, update to the latest software (which on a G1 means running CyanogenMod since the official updates are still stuck at Android 1.6 for G1s, and CyanogenMod is a 1.6/2.0 hybrid - and despite rumors to the contrary, CyanogenMod is rock-solid stable on the G1) and see how much things have improved over the last 18 months.
The openness of the Android platform is what really is blowing me away. Running CyanogenMod, installing themes, downloading up-to-the-minute app releases and bug fixes from open source projects and vendors without having to go through Market is absolutely liberating after 2 and change years of iPhone usage, and having to clamor for every feature addition and update. On Android, if you want a new feature, you can usually find it or you can add it yourself - K9mail is the best living example of this itch-scratching driving innovation.
Anyway, more specifically on the topic - I don't know if Fennec/Mobile Firefox will be a winner or not in the short run. Most likely it will take a while to get there - remember how long Mozilla took to get to a usable desktop browser? But ultimately, more browser competition on Android will be a very good thing, and AdBlock would be sweet. The fact that we have these choices on Android drives innovation and competition, and is the reason that the platform is currently improving faster than the iPhone platform. And makes it a much more fun place to be as a geek than iPhone-land right now.
Now if carriers would just lower the cost of their data plans, maybe we could afford to try it out!
How does this technology work? Since the android gui is written in a java dialect, and firefox is written in C/C++, how does a C++ program run on a java VM? As one big native plugin?
anyway,having a runnin POC might attact other developers, that cannot be bad for fennec.
That's simply not true. Yes, the lack of a quit button may be personally annoying to you, but it's not going to cause active applications to run out of memory. The Android system WILL close less recently used apps to free up memory as needed.
Slashdot needs a "-1, Wrong" moderation option.
The Urban Hippie
I just installed it on my rooted, custom ROMmed and overclocked Motorola Droid.... and it worked! I played with it for about 10 minutes. It didn't crash my phone, reboot my phone or damage my phone in any way.
It's absolutely alpha quality software at this point, so don't expect much from it. But it has lots of potential and I'm absolutely confident this will turn into a great browser on Android.
so your question is 'why would i download a pre-alpha release and play around with it on my phone' because it MIGHT NOT WORK
...mine is why are you on slashdot if that sounds like something you wouldn't do? i was really excited about the release and installed it immediately for my Moto Droid and then i come into the one place on the web where i thought that others would share my enthusiasm and here you two are pissing all over it for being, you know, an alpha release.
Trust me I was enthusiastic about it until I finished reading and got to the point where it said looking at pages with a lot of information will cause issues with low memory devices like the Droid. I was all of 2 seconds away from downloading it until I seen that. I have no problem with bugs and the like but when there are issues with memory utilization on devices specifically my phone then I would prefer to wait until those issues are resolved. I don't mind bugs but slowness due to memory problems I do mind.
Once FF works on Android, we can use its superior plugins like AdBlock and NoScript.
Maybe. If the mobile version supports plugins, and those plugins are in the same format as the desktop ones. There's no guarantee of either, though.
It does, and they are. There are a few tweaks that add-on authors should make to their add-ons to support the mobile versions (mainly UI-related), but those are trivial for most cases. I say this as someone who has ported more add-ons to Firefox for Mobile than anyone else (as far as I know).
Why then would I want to replace my webkit browser with this? I understand this is an Alpha and that bug might be fixed, but again, why would I want to use this over my webkit based browser?
Because some of us view OSS as more than just free software. Some of us want to help debug/test it and add to the community. Some are out for more than just a free-ride (although there's nothing wrong with a free-ride when it's offered.)
There are lies, damned lies, and statistics.
I’m sure it does, but apparently its “when needed” doesn’t quite agree with what I want.
My G1 consistently falls into prolonged periods of very bad responsiveness after using applications with large footprints. I don’t know what’s going on there, but some things are eating resources much more than a simple “kill it and reclaim resources” should take. It’s obvious that programs I no longer use will often keep using resources to the detriment of those I do use.
There’s a reverse side of that coin, and it’s also annoying: it will also kill things you don’t want it to. For instance, it will almost always kill my music player while using Maps navigation (though it does so inconsistently), simply because it’s in the background and Maps is lagging. But, while I want the nav program in the foreground, I don’t really care about having it responsive _all_ the time.
I’d much rather be able to tell it what to close (and, by omission, tell it not to stop my music playing).
"I think I am a fallen star. I should wish on myself."
I see you're one of those people who knows a few testing buzzwords, and thus consider yourself an expert in the field.
Just so you know, "UAT" refers to user-acceptance testing, not "usability testing" like you've mistakenly claimed. Usability testing checks whether or not the program is convenient to use, whether or not it's accessible to people with handicaps, whether or not it works well with various input and output devices, and so forth.
User-acceptance testing ("UAT") refers to testing that the client or user performs in order to ensure that the system meets their minimum requirements in terms of functionality, usability, stability, reliability, performance, and so on.
Oh, and your breakdown of the tests applied to each release level are pure bunk. They don't even correspond to Firefox's development practices at all. Please refrain from spewing mountains of bullshit the next time you post. Thank you!
my point was why are you afraid to test it yourself? as soon as i saw that they said that worst case scenario was rebooting i was ready to try it. shit, i have 'professional' apps that have crashed my phone before (google sky map, i am looking at you). i was willing to put up with a little slowness to test drive a shiny new browser.
Good god man, my FF never goes over 100mb, even with lots of tabs open. It averages at 70mb and i'm sure you can configure it to be even more minimal.
It's possible your build is bad. Are you using something stable and tested by your distro?
http://soylentnews.org/~tibman
For me, i love to download and test drive open source stuff. I remove 90% of it, but sometimes you run into some really great apps.
http://soylentnews.org/~tibman
"Mozilla has unveiled a build for handsets running Android 2.0 or above."
So I can wait around for TMO to declare that 2.0+ will NOT be released for my G1. I'll have to root it.
Ok, one more reason.
And for you who ask 'why would I rerplace Webkit with this?', I offer you some reasons:
1. Rather than usae Steel, Firefox might let you set the user agent to 'Desktop' or equivalent, allowing you to get your regular fully-featured version of iGoogle instead of the neutered, 'mobile' version. Google has decided, in their infinte wisdom, to force mobile brwsers to use mobil renders of their pages wherever possible. This is, from a Google blog, 'intended to give mobile users a consistent user experience'. If I wanted a consistently mobile experience, I would have gotten a BlackBerry. I wanted a BETTER experience, so I got an Android phone. Evil, you are. Subvert, I will. Root, I must.
2. Better UI? Everything beyond typing in a URL or clicking requires the Menu button in the stock Browser. Steel gives you an onscreen crescent to go back/forward, swap windows, open new windows, or get bookmarks. I would expect Mozilla to do something like that in Fennec - but we do have to wait and see.
3. Faster? never know...
4. Even more malware blocking? I don't see anything that hurts my phone yet, and I use it to open stuff I distrust just to see what happens. Fennec might be even more fun.
5. It might actually clear the cache on exit, instead of growing like a weed despite having the setting 'clear cache on exit' selected. One can dream...
deleting the extra space after periods so i can stay relevant, yeah.
Fennec has been around for a while actually. Most of the speculating can be placed at rest from this site: https://wiki.mozilla.org/Projects/Mobile Unfortunately, if anyone is wondering, no there will not be a version for Windows Mobile phones, as there is no NDK (Native Developers Kit). I would prefer to use firefox on my phone, but i'm stuck with opera mobile 9.
Of all the things I've lost; I miss my mind the most. - Mark Twain
I see what your saying, however I have very bad luck with phones for some reason. So for me to put something on that is pre-alpha is a little sketchy and thats just my opinion. By all means I appreciate the people that will test it and say whether or not it causes major issues especially if they are running a Droid. I am no programmer, I may be a techie but when it comes to anything with programming not so much. I build, repair, troubleshoot, and use beta's on computers, but phones not so much do to my luck with them. Keep in mind I run 3-4 different OS because I like to differentiate what I use depending on what my purpose to being on the PC at that point is. I have been using Google Chrome is before it was finalized and vista and 7 both since they were in beta, so i have no problem using them. But when I known issue is that it will run slow when loading larger pages (wich i visit quite often on my phone) and it is specifically mentioning my phone, well then I will wait. Again I am not bashing it I simply and giving my opinion and I hope other people can tell me it works better than expected.
I love Firefox. I use it on all my computers as a browser. It offers me more features than Chrome, and more stability and security than IE.
That said, I don't want to use it on my Droid. My droid is a 500MHz piece with very limited RAM, and Firefox has a whole buttload of overhead. The browser that came with Android 1.2 is just fine for me. Does Firefox for Android add flash support? That would be the only reason I could ever bring myself to use it.
If the only way you can accept an assertion is by faith, then you are conceding that it can't be taken on its own merits
fair enough, but for what it's worth it is working fine on my Moto Droid. i am not going to be using it as my primary browser yet, but the UI is pretty slick.
That's nice, but Google Chrome has NoScript and CookieSafe built in. The Firefox devs refuse to offer that, so Firefox is always going to have a bloat issue compared to Chrome.
Did you seriously just claim that less built-in features = more bloat? By that logic emacs is less bloated than nano.
You're confusing opera mini with opera mobile.
I have a g1. You really need to use a task manager and uninstall anything that possibly runs at boot/in the background. They are just waaaay too ram limited. Also check out cyanogen mod as well as the 10mb RAM hack and turning on compcache and swap. My phone flies compared to stock android 1.6 and I have stuff on every desktop. Just keep getting rid of stuff till it gets smooth again....
zosxavius photography
Also. I can open apps over and over again on my g1 and have the desktop pop up. You really need to do some serious tweaking to optimize it, but I don't think I'd trade it for even a nexus one at this point. My music app never closes in the background and I can run music, go to maps, hit the home screen and pull open a browser without much delay at all. It just sounds like you have too much stuff active. Even the task killers tend to leave services running in the background. You don't want any services running on the g1 other than the stock ones, though I find astrid runs ok.
zosxavius photography
OMG! That's the nirvana of multitasking that i've been robbed of with my iPhone?
The mobile version of Firefox, codenamed Fennec, has until now been restricted to Maemo Linux handsets
O RLY? Perhaps submitters should check to see if they know WTF they are talking about before they add flowery language to their story submissions. Wouldn't hurt if editors checked their veracity (AHAHAHAHHAHAHAHHA)
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
What version of Android you are running? Cyanogen 4.2.14 was pretty problematic. The latest version 4.2.15.1 (and the one before that) did address loads of issues, and (at least) my G1 is working a lot better now.
Thanks for the update, I will probably take a look at it then since I also have a MOTO Droid. I will provide feedback as well once I get into using it.
He says the browser might require me to reboot my phone. Isn't this a sign of a flawed operating system? An application shouldn't cause the entire phone to freeze.
I was experiencing random glitches on my Motorola Droid. Verizon told me to do a factory reset because sometimes apps make the phone do strange things, hampering the phone's functionality. Shouldn't a proper OS keep apps from messing up the whole phone, no matter how crappy the app is?
Penny - plain text accounting
Maybe you don't understand. Memory starved phones in the first place, such as a G1, can only handle 2 or 3 apps in the background. With the magic "we'll close it when it hits 6", that doesn't work. Nor is it appropriate for phones that can handle more than 6 or less.
People need to have the option to determine this themselves, and google has not provided it. It could be as simple as "maximum performance/battery" = no more than 3 apps before it stops caching them, and "maximum apps" = maximum of 6 or 8.
How many phones does this apply to? Everything that has hardware less than what the N1/incredible has. Every other phone doesn't have the memory to support it.
Did you seriously just claim that less built-in features = more bloat?
It's not always as clear-cut as you imply. Features that are built in typically require fewer resources than ones that are not (this is especially true in FireFox, where most extensions use JavaScript, so have VM overhead on top, while a lot of built in things are statically compiled native code).
If a feature that you use is built in to one product and optional in another, then this often means that the version where it is not built in will use more resources when you are using that feature. In this case, the product with fewer features has more bloat.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
While many people may have an extra PC to try pre-alpha software on, not that many have an extra Android phone in the closet. You don't want your only cell phone to be f***ed up in an emergency because you put FF on it.
While it's true that I got my Droid for free, most people didn't. I don't see how not using FF on my phone implies a free ride.
did you read the summary, the GP, or the article?
the worst case scenario is that browser gets slow on large pages or that it might cause your phone to hang/reboot. i am pretty sure that in the normal use case for a smartphone a reboot every now and then isn't going to cause immediate death. if you work in a life or death environment you should be provided with a dedicated communications device, such as a radio
Jeeze what are you doing? I keep two copies of firefox open with probably 60-90 tabs between them, several of which are hulu/crackle/youtube. They stay open for weeks at a stretch and it reads around 600-900MB.
At one point I had three browsers on my N900:
1. MicroB, the stock Mozilla-based browser.
2. Fennec (RC version IIRC)
3. Iceweasel (Firefox), run via a chrooted Debian install
In short, Fennec had the poor performance. clumsiness and nonexistent system integration of Iceweasel (as run on the N900) with the reduced functionality of MicroB, so I uninstalled it. Now I use MicroB most of the time, and Firefox if I want to spoof user agents, visit iffy sites that could benefit from NoScript, or do anything else more advanced.
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
While that guys usage is absurd, my Firefox memory usage is never under 200. It's the main reason I use Chrome now. I can kill off any processes that are slowing my system/browser down without killing everything. Sometimes my usage gets into the high 300s on my home computers, but I'm doing a lot more (browsing wise) at home than I am at work.
Wise men say, "Forgiveness is divine, but never pay full price for late pizza."
Sure, because when a developer delivers untested code you should always believe him when he tells you what the worst case scenario is.
Install Autokiller from the market and set it to aggressive mode. It keeps my phone running nice and fast. It might still kill your music player though, I don't use it so I don't know for sure. I've heard there are ways to keep it from killing particular apps, you might ask on XDA about that.
No no no your thinking of the Palm Pre's multitasking. You know the one thing that the phone does that blows all others out of the water.
Oh yeah! the pre, the phone with no apps, but great multitasking. it's like greek tragedy.
Yes it was supposed to be Palm's savior but it was less like Jesus and more like Marten Luther King. They had a dream but then got assassinated and now will just be something talked about in the future about how innovative they were and how its too bad they died the way they did.
GP was talking about his experience with Fennec (Mozilla Firefox for mobile platforms) running on an N900 (Maemo) handset. I tried Chrome on my N900 and found it nearly unusable. It was sluggish, felt underpowered and didn't present me with any immediate advantage over both the standard built-in browser or Fennec.
Fennec, even on Maemo (I'm assuming/hoping development and refinement hasn't stopped for that platform), still has some ways to go. I'll often use the built-in browser, which seems to share *some* codebase with Fennec, though I may be entirely wrong here, over Fennec. It has a smaller memory footprint, doesn't seem to bog down the system as easily as Fennec when you have a couple of "heavy" content pages loaded and packs all the features I need for my usual browsing habits -- especially after you download and install an ABP-like plugin/hack for it (the one that actually worked for me also has the side-benefit of blocking automatic playback of flash -- I have to click flash-based content for it to "play", which is a *huge* boon when you're on the go and don't have an unlimited data plan with your mobile provider [there's no such thing around here, not as such], even more if you're roaming).
Though both Fennec and Firefox *should* be lighter than they are, and you won't find many around here that'll dispute that, they still offer a Good Enough(TM) browsing experience that keeps them ahead of their competition in terms of many people's mindshare. Couple that with the complete customization you can achieve through the better breed of add-ons and you have a powerful combination that can't be had with any other browser. To each his own, I guess.
It's not Firefox and it hasn't really arrived because it's not even alpha (!?) and it only runs on 10% of Android phones. But other than that, the headline is exactly right.
In over a year of having Android phones I've never once needed to hard reset Android. It's an incredibly stable OS, even with the crappiest crashing apps on an aftermarket ROMs I've never made it lock up. So if they've managed to freeze Android that's quite an achievement.
After logging in slashdot still does not take you back to the page you were on. It's been that way for 20 years.
like the Apple Newton. If palm finds a way to survive, they could come back. People learn more from failure than success.
You’re right, I am on 4.2.14. And it did feel a slower than usual, I just assumed I just bloated it with apps. (Though I don’t actually use a lot.)
For some reason my CM Updater hasn’t been updated since 4.0 (I think its name was slightly changed; when I looked explicitly for it the app store found it and updated it). That version didn’t offer updates after 4.2.14.
I’m updating now. Are you also using the 2.22.23.02 radio image?
"I think I am a fallen star. I should wish on myself."
I’m using Cyanogen already (though I’m only now updating to the latest version), and AFAIK I don’t have any services other than standard.
Can you recommend a good task manager (as per your first answer)? I’ve tried a couple, but didn’t see much effect.
Actually, can you confirm that you’re using navigation and music simultaneously without issues? I can run Maps just fine, it’s the turn-by-turn navigation that (often) turns music off. (Presumably since it’s 3D.)
I hesitated to try the 10MB hack, since it’s supposed to make trouble for 3D apps; the only one I use is Maps’ navigation, though, if you can confirm it works I’ll try it.
Oh, and are you using the 2.22.23.02 radio image?
"I think I am a fallen star. I should wish on myself."
Good thing that's nothing like what the Android system actually does. The full description of the application lifecycle is available in the SDK if you're interested, but the general idea is that any app which leaves the foreground is given a chance to save some of it's state as it is hidden, and may be terminated at any point after that if the active application needs more resources. Your claim that the visible application is "running out of memory" because the Android system is keeping 5 other apps in active RAM is simply completely false.
You can test this yourself by installing TaskKiller or some other utility that DOES let you view and terminate the active applications. Depending which phone you have, how many background services you have running, and the size of the apps you launch sequentially, the number of "most recently used" apps that are kept active WILL change to optimize the experience. For example, flipping through some random apps on my Hero and then opening it, I see that only the last 3 from my particular sequence are still active, even though 6 are displayed in the "latest apps" switcher that comes up when you press and hold the Home button.
It turns out that the number of apps in that view is just a convenience function, and represents absolutely nothing about the actual operating conditions of the Android system, nor anything meaningful about how the system prioritizes resource allocation. Which is pretty damn obvious if you would stop to think about it for a minute before insulting it based on your own broken assumptions.
Slashdot needs a "-1, Wrong" moderation option.
The Urban Hippie
Yep. And background services are TRUE background services, and don't get terminated unless the system is under serious resource constraint. Unlike the iPhone 4 where "background service" means either "you get a wake-up call at a pre-set time" or "let me finish some stuff for x seconds after I leave the foreground". Both are nice, I guess, but being able to launch an actual background service with no forced waits or time constraint still blows it out of the water.
The actual lifecycle model is pretty badass even for foreground tasks, too.
Slashdot needs a "-1, Wrong" moderation option.
The Urban Hippie
The 10MB hack may break some 3d apps, but I've found it just makes them a lot slower. Navigation works, but at a choppy framerate, but nothing terrible. Even most average GPS units lag a bit in the display. This is with music playing on the music app. I was also able to browse some web pages and have navigation call out voice commands along the way. Compcache and swap seem to help somewhat. For me the biggest downer is wanting to have a bunch of widgets on the home screen, but asides from the power widget, the music widget, a pandora folder, calwidget (great widget), astrid and a bunch of icons that's about all I have running. I also have systempanel running all the time in the background it seems pretty lightweight. It does logging and a bunch of really nice things. (nice uninstaller/archiver too). Oh, and I have the service that announces the caller via TTS, so I could make it even more lightweight for sure, but I find that I don't have a great deal of issues.Getting to the home screen after its been dumped can take like 20-30 seconds sometimes. Especially with music playing. That's about the worst case. It takes a heavy app to dump the home screen though, and also music is streaming of the sdcard while the swap is getting hit as well as loading icons for about 30-40 or so apps off the sdcard, so really the sdcard is becoming point of contention for me now. I'm only running a class 4 and I hear that a class 6 makes a big difference with more swap, so I'm thinking about trying that. Rumor has it that 2.1 is more optimized than 1.6 and will run faster when really stripped down, but I'm kind of waiting to some of the kinks to still iron out of the 2.1 roms that are floating around, since they sound even buggier than cyanogen (which is mostly stable as of late). I've been tempted to revert to a stock 1.6 rom for sheer speed, but I don't think I could possibly give up the browser with multitouch. I'd be really sad to have to go back to the lame zoom controls taking up half the real estate. For my limited needs, like having music playing while web browsing or checking out facebook, the g1 is pretty much a workhorse. I'd give up frills and speed for the better keyboard any day and after using the touch keyboard for periods of time (hey its there) I still find it very cumbersome. I picked the g1 over even the newer android phones out there because of the keyboard and I really liked the trackball too. I even like the way the screen swings out and I really don't understand why all the reviewers hated it so much. It certainly was different and I like the way it snaps out with authority. I've never had anything resembling a smartphone before, and even the old palm I used to have doesn't even begin to compare with what is possible with even a humble g1. I'm just kind of holding out for the next great keyboard equipped android phone. The nexus one and the htc desire really don't do much for me, and all the newer designs seem to take cues from the droid with the smaller slideout keyboard with less keys, which makes me kind of sad as well. Anyways, I hope that helps.
zosxavius photography
Yeah. Its active apps that won't go to cache as well as services that eat up processor and ram. If something is inactive in the background its as good as closed for what its worth. Any android task manager worth its salt will tell you the state of the app. Some apps don't play nice, and I can see where the average user isn't going to understand any of that and there probably isn't much they would know to do other than uninstall the app, that is, if they knew it was what was slowing their phone down. I'm on a G1 though, so ram is much more of an issue, the newer phones probably have a lot less issues, what with 256-512megs to play with.....
zosxavius photography
Lately firefox seems to be a lot better with ram usage. Before it was typically 3-400 megs for me, now it is significantly less. I fear you are using it terribly wrong somehow.
zosxavius photography
CM Updater seems abandoned to me. The RSS feed of the cyanogen website has become a mess.
Cyanogen seems to be using his own twitter feed to announce stuff, which I find terribly shortsighted. BTW, a Android_2.1 image is about to be released for testing on the G1/Dream.
Regarding the radio, I have a version 2_22_19_26I. Is your G1 from Rogers? The 2_22_19_26I is the latest file on HTC's website. Where did you get this radio from?
Got it from http://forum.xda-developers.com/showthread.php?t=640535
It seems to be working OK, but I only installed it yesterday, so I’ve no long-term observations.
My G1 is a dev version bought from a Google employee (some of them got one for free last year).
Actually, CM Updater seems developed still, but something went wrong with automatic updates a while ago. I updated to 5.0.1 manually (searched for it in the Market app) and then it found the .15.1 ROM.
"I think I am a fallen star. I should wish on myself."
Its an Alpha release. All Alpha releases will at your paper, kill your cat and possibly burn down your house. Use at your own risk.
For those who want to play around with a pre-release product however, this is exciting. If you can't handle the world of pre-release, stay out.
- Michael T. Babcock (Yes, I blog)