Submitted by The developer team behind Firefox has announced plans to bring a mobile version of the technology to the market in 2008. “People ask us all the time about what Mozilla’s going to do about the mobile web, and I’m very excited to announce that we plan to rock it,” Mike Schroepfer, a Mozilla developer known as ‘schrep’, wrote on the Mozillazine blog.
Same thing?
From what I gather it didn’t go anywhere, ironically, and this is more or less just having another go at it.
No, something entirely different. Minimo is dead. This is an attempt to provide something much more akin to the desktop version of Firefox.
‘Specifically, Mozilla will add mobile devices to the first class/tier-1 platform set for Mozilla2, the next-generation browser technology due in 2008, Schroepfer wrote. “This means we will make core platform decisions with mobile devices as first-class citizens. We will ship a version of “Mobile Firefox” which can, among other things, run Firefox extensions on mobile devices and allow others to build rich applications via XUL.’
Note that Mozilla2 is effectively the same thing as Gecko 2, and not to be confused with Firefox 2, which is already out of course…
I use Minimo 0.2 on my Nokia 770, and it’s actually a fairly nice browser. It’s “homebase” bookmarking method is a little weird, but as a general browser it’s fast and reasonably compatible.
The memory and performance optimizations from the mobile version will probably end up in the standard firefox too.
Excellent. Hopefully Firefox won’t require 60MB of RAM to load Google’s website.
Well, I’m using firefox x64 (64bit programs tend to use more ram c.f. boundary alignment) and google takes up 30Mb Ram (31 actually).
So you’re off by a factor of 2. Of course if you’ve installed the special I’mAnMSShill extension that reserves 32Mb ram for the fun of it, then I could see where you’ve got the extra 30Mb from.
Edit: Compare that to IE64 that gets to 39Mb, and I’m really not sure which is more of a memory hog.
Edited 2007-10-12 11:13 UTC
If you’re prepared to defend the memory efficient of Firefox, you’ll be facing a lot of people convinced the otherwise.
Edited 2007-10-12 12:18
I’m just quoting the numbers, other peoples prejudices have nothing to do with it.
‘eh, Firefox’s numbers seem fine at first.. Until you leave it running for a couple of days with several tabs open… next thing you know, it has used up 300+ mb of ram… At least, that is what it does on *my* machine. Running Windows XP Pro SP2 with latest Firefox 2 install..
Edited 2007-10-12 15:51
I often find firefox in the 300MB+ range too, on a similar system. As I’m a programmer, I have many tabs open and leave my system on all the time. I’ve become accustomed to regularly restarting firefox, to “empty” the memory holes.
I use Session Manager to preserve the tab state after restarting.
It’s kind of like it was with windows 95, so long ago… a restart a day keeps the memory hog at bay.
Um, that’s all I’m doing.
Firefox might be able to work on mobile linux devices TODAY if it wasn’t for the ridiculously suboptimal performance. So yeah, basically they are going to build a new Firefox that isn’t a memory pig.
Pigs might fly too, but in this case they’re too fat and heavy so they wont.
Or, the memory and performance resource requirements will hinder the mobile version. Remains to be seen…
…of software and hardware development is becoming more and more centered on the embedded space. No wonder Firefox want a peace of the pie.
I wonder if they can cut down the behemoth that is Firefox enough to compete with the like of Opera? Somehow, I get the feeling that, having witnessed the stellar rise of Firefox from the beginning, it won’t take to long.
I wish some of the Linux distros would take the same approach. Microsoft has by no means dominated the mobile device world, the way they’ve dominated the desktop. Of course, getting a new OS onto a mobile device is a lot harder than getting a new application installed.
umm for the record microsoft has a HUGE stake in the mobile and embedted world. WinCE is in all kids of stuff and is suprisingly well coded. MS did good with WinCE.
Who said anything about them not having a stake in it? I just said they haven’t got it locked down the way the have with desktop market. There’s lots of room for competition in the pocket. Given the way Opera have been so successful in the mobile browser market, surely Red Hat or SUSE would fancy a shot at beating MS in this rapidly growing arena?
(posted on Windows Mobile 2003SE, Opera Mobile 8.6)
“I wonder if they can cut down the behemoth that is Firefox enough to compete with the like of Opera? Somehow, I get the feeling that, having witnessed the stellar rise of Firefox from the beginning, it won’t take to long.”
I find it more likely that they’ll implement memory swapping by hand. Symbian OS 9.3 onward already implement demand paging…
Now, quite frankly, would the mobile vendors please take their heads out of their rears and include decent amount of RAM on their devices? What’s up with Nokia bundling odd numbers like 45MB on the E70 for example? And leaving at best 22MB of free RAM for applications. And the horrid memory leak that lowers this to 14MB after light usage of the S60 browser and a couple J2ME midlets?
I’d rather have abundant RAM and just enough builtin Flash to store the firmware and perhaps 8MB of user data, and have everything else go to a memory card. That’s a tradeoff I’d gladly make. Make it mandatory to use 150X SD cards, I don’t care! But the out-of-memory situation on most mobile devices is so damn annoying that I don’t even know where to begin.
The Wii has 31% less RAM (and I’m being really nice to Nokia by including the Wii’s video RAM on this calculation) than the revised 8GB Nokia N95, and yet it’s capable of so much more. The Internet Channel Opera doesn’t bomb out of memory nearly as frequently as Symbian versions. And ARM machine code is so much denser than PPC’s. This points squarely to Symbian’s inefficiency at handling memory.
This said, I believe Firefox has nowhere to go but Pocket PCs. Symbian is a dead end. It can’t handle this kind of stuff.
Unless they go Opera Mini’s route and offload most of the DOM processing to an intermediate server, and only deals with presenting constructed, laid out pages. They won’t need anything more than a Cairo canvas and a stream of drawing instructions, and some interpreter to handle transformed Javascript code. But that rings as a 3rd party opportunity, no?
Any intrepid souls willing to try? Maybe we can build a startup =P
🙂
I think firefox won’t get much more optimized than Firefox3 will be. Rather the mobile device’s will have to get as powerful as desktop computers from 2001.
is having an effect even on the Mozilla Foundation and doesn’t want to be ignored in the Linux Mobile camps.
Good luck. Qt/WebKit and Trolltech, not to mention GTK+/WebKit are making big strides.
What a horrible story.
Basically, they are saying: small devices and the embedded space is too low powered to run web browsers and they are getting more powerful so we can move there… and somehow this is revolutionary.
“”Getting a no-compromise web experience on devices requires significant memory (>=64MB) as well as significant CPU horsepower,” Schroepfer added”
Excuse me? What is this “no-compromise”; does he believe that only Firefox is the “no-compromise” solution?
Yet again it seems that the Mozilla mob are re-writing history to suit themselves.
If you want to visit say: the Steam website, you you have lots of layout, many MB of Images, streaming video, Flash, Javascript, all jumbled together.
Displaying that correctly is a ‘no-compromise’ web experience. And I would be surprised if it could be done in less than 64Mb of Ram with any browser at any reasonable speed. As Rasterman says: It’s amazing what a little cache can do to your life.
They are kidding right? A memory hug to a mobile?
Lol. Memory Hug sounds much more cute than any pig-allusion.
Wow. I already have Nokia’s MicroB and Minimo running on my 770 alongside Opera and Links. A full Firefox would be a nice thing, I guess, but it seems a bit redundant.
My Treo 680 could use a better browser… Blazer is passable, but not exactly exciting.
Why didn’t your posting get a nice second-class citizen identifier like this one?
Browser: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux armv5tejl; rv:1.8.1.5pre) Gecko/20070619 Minimo/0.020