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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."
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.
Symbian could be nice, but it seems like targeting MeeGo would be a better bet, especially as they already have a Maemo version done and MeeGo is the heir apparent for Symbian.
Actually, now that I think about it, I believe that when the MeeGo Notebook UX was released the devs chose Fennec as the browser, so maybe there's not much work left to do there.
Having Firefox on Symbian (e.g. on the next Nokia N8 phone, etc...) would also hitch Firefox to the transition wagon that Nokia is driving to try to get Symbian developers and hardware integrators to eventually move to MeeGo. There could be some benefit to be had there...
coding is life
Even if you did implement an actual, bona fide web browser in Java 2 Micro Edition, whatever you end up with would neither be Firefox nor would it live up to the Firefox name.
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.
I've installed it on my n900, but it's unusably slow, especially compared to MicroB, which is the default browser on Maemo (which also uses the gecko engine). It takes ages to start up, uses up all the CPU, and it takes 5 minutes before you finally managed to load a page. Also, after you close the browser, there's a 'fennec' process still using all the CPU cycles and draining your battery.
Too bad, because I do like its feature set: Firefox sync, addons, etc, but I'll stick to MicroB until they find a solution to the CPU use issue.