Slashdot Mirror
Firefox Mobile 1.1 Released
An anonymous reader writes "Firefox Mobile 1.1 has been released for Maemo devices such as the Nokia N900. Madhava Enros has put together a field guide for Firefox Mobile 1.1 which highlights what's new and notable in this release."
Huh! They won't do that...
Except it wouldn't be Firefox. Opera Mini isn't Opera, although it uses Opera. Opera Mini is:
Opera Mini (and for that matter, BitStream BOLT) is a J2ME client for an Internet service. This service involves a server that runs a web browser. For Opera Mini, the server runs a customized copy of Presto. For BitStream BOLT, customized WebKit. The web browser on the server sends back specialized markup and data in a "partially rendered" format - doing a lot of the rendering on the service server, but yet returning rich data back to the client, as opposed to a big image file with a clickmap, Things like complex CSS rules might be render to the client as markup saying, "draw a blue box from 35,15 to 100,85". Text is sent to allow for reflowability.
Firefox for J2ME would mean Mozilla would have to run a server containing a specialized Gecko renderer that outputs a simplified form of the page as simple markup, plus a J2ME client that would finish rendering from the simplified output. Great concept but too many problems.
Firefox was release a few days ago on the N900. The user interface is indeed nice, very intuitive too, however the browser is still quite slow. If you enable flash (through about:config) it hangs the interface for long periods of time, particularly with video playback it stutters constantly - probably flash 10.1 will sort this out whenever they feel like releasing it - my understanding is that this version of flash will have hardware acceleration.
All in all it's nice, I would love to use it as my default browser, though the interface is a little unresponsive at the moment. Chromium suffers the same problem in a way.
The real question is how did you manage to miss that MeeGo is essentially not a replacement, but rebranding? (and hardware of mobile phones supposedly wasn't there yet, in 2003)
Uh, what? Almost everything is totally different in MeeGo. I mean, it's going from GTK+ to Qt, for starters. Or how about the fact that it's based on Moblin, not on Maemo? I was following the Moblin releases when they suddenly became MeeGo and went from having to not having a GUI on x86.
MeeGo is absolutely a replacement for Maemo. And your Maemo software won't run on it. And Maemo was NEVER fully opened, but MeeGo is supposed to be, and Moblin was.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
No, that isn't true. Double-tap is "smart zoom". Use the hardware volume keys to zoom in and out in increments.
Learning HOW to think is more important than learning WHAT to think.
http://www.opera.com/mobile/download/versions/
Unless your WinMo phone has very little RAM (less than 50MB free on bootup), you should be a be able to run Opera Mobile. They offer it for free now on their site.
I don't always use unix-like operating systems; but when I do, I prefer FreeBSD.