Minimo, the Mozilla browser for mobile devices, is poised to move beyond Linux PDAs and onto Windows CE devices, according to the Mozilla Foundation. Screenshot here (mobile version of OSNews is showing). Elsewhere, the Mozilla chairman Mitch Kapor speaks out.
Mini-Mozilla marches toward Windows mobiles
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Eugenia Loli
Ex-programmer, ex-editor in chief at OSNews.com, now a visual artist/filmmaker.
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Can’t wait for the Symbian version to give Opera on my 6600 a run for its money.
I only see mention of a Windows CE version. What about Palm and Symbian? We desperately need a better, stable, not-made-by-a-16-year-old-at-3-in-the-morning-after-too-much-Jolt-Cola version.
Speaking of Opera… at this point, I’d gladly take either Opera or Minimo on my Treo650… just anything but the stock Blazer or the black & white “look at my first attempt at coding” browsers.
Hmmm… maybe I should port WINE to the Palm, then run IE inside of WINE.
Minimo requires lots of memory and lots of speed. Most Symbian and PalmOS devices are really not that powerful or have lots of RAM. If they were to make Minimo to run on these, it would be really slow and it would only run on a few models.
BTW, I just installed it on my Dell x50v. The app is now loading for TWO minutes, it’s _extremely_ slow. I will let you know if it ever gets loaded.
I’ve got nokia 9500, and the internal Opera browser is okay, but does not support lots of thing (ftp:// included).
Yup, both Blazer and WebPro suck on PalmOS. I wish that Access had a free-to-buy version of NetFront for Palm. They only seem to ship Netfront with custom devices, not for all Palm models.
BTW, 4 minutes into loading Minimo. STill not loaded.
Again, Series 60 Symbian would be great for this – not that NetFront is a bad browser, though – Nokia at least give a decent browser on business phones, it’d just be nice to have a *better* one.
Although minimo probably doesn’t have PDF support, which NetFront does. 🙁
I had to reset my PDA. Minimo does not run on the Dell x50v with the Win2003SE and 64 MBs of RAM. It would show me the loading cursor forever and it eventually brought the PDA to a halt.
If they were ported to s60’s?
BTW, if anyone has made it work with his WinCE PDA, please visit osnews.com and tell me if it looks like this layout: http://www.newmobilecomputing.com/img/3761/osnews.jpg or it is like the desktop version with ads and sidebars.
I need to know, so I can make sure that the minimo guys are using the right user agent (a version of it recently had a bug and it didn’t send out a “minimo” user agent so I couldn’t serve it the mobile pages). Thx.
>If they were ported to s60’s?
No, none of these are better alternatives to Opera or Netfront or even to the native Symbian HTML browser.
I wouldn’t expect Minimo to work being its not even in the beta stages for Pocket PC devices. But anyhow thanks for trying it out and letting us lesser-then-brave fellows know that doesn’t even run yet.
The new palmos devices does have enough with ram and CPU if it cant run on a XScale 300-400 Mhz it isnt a good app it would go quite slow on those 600 Mhz Pocket PC to. I have a Palm Tungsten T5 and a writing this in the webbrowser blazer but it would be nice to have a alternative, but i guess it wont come to palmos because the api on the palm diffs tomuch from pocket pc that have much from windows. But it would be nice to have it ported.
Actually, almost anything that runs on palmos in xscale devices is written for 68k. Only limited amounts of ARM native code is possible through armlets.
So in that regard, yes it would be slow and it would be a totally different architecture to build for not to mention optimize.
Binary size in palmos is also severely limited and most palmos based devices don’t have a whole lot of ram.
– Kevin
Exactly. If Mozilla was to be ported on PalmOS, PalmOS 6 must be used. But the problem is, there are no such devices out there, so that would be a useless port and waste of time.
And depending on the device, the same goes for Symbian too. The only OS and hardware accompanied that can “hold” Minimo well are either Linux or Windows CE. The rest, today, are a joke and can’t run Mozilla effectively.
Well yes, eugenia, i think the only real “horsepower” lies in the CE or linux powered handhelds. The reason for this is simple, they were designed with these goals in mind.
Palms evolved from something very simple, and in reality, they still are something very simple and are really struggling to keep up.
I bought a zire72 not too long ago.
Great hardware, hate the platform, i’ll never buy palm again.
Things could be so much faster and efficient, it’s like they changed platforms just to be able to say “hey look we make 400 mhz xscale ones now too”
Cobalt is a myth, i have yet to see cobalt powered devices.
Symbian looks more promising then palmos but still severely underpowered for such applications.
I think it’s too bad that it won’t run on your x50v, i’m sure we would have gotten plenty of screenshots if it would
– Kevin
Cobalt is a myth, i have yet to see cobalt powered devices.
Sadly this seems to be true. No Palm OS 6 devices even exsist and the operating system has been out since early last year. To top that off you have PalmOne saying they won’t upgrade beyond OS 5 for a while since they claim they don’t need any of OS 6’s functionality. Top that off with Sony completely dumping the Clie devision and you have a bad situation for PalmSource.
And without Palm OS 6 there is no real chance of being able to use the full power of today’s faster hardware. And without the ability to use the full power of that hardware there is a finite limit to what can really be accomplished software wise on Palm based devices.
The real ironic thing here is that PalmSource is already working on Palm OS 6.1 and there are litterally zero OS 6 devices on the market. I hope that PalmSource is able to pull of something to keep themselves in the game for a while yet, I’d hate to see them go.
since there is a planned win ce port what about also porting it to windows ce 5.0 (on above when released) on the x86 platform. it would make a great embedded browser
Does Minimo have the zoom/shrink functionality of Opera? If yes, it should be incorporated in Firefox.
the next non-web-based killer app is going to be a solid PIM that syncs to current major handheld/mobile OSes. if we could get thunderbird/sunbird integration with sync to clients for pocketPC and Palm, mountains would move.
That is truly, truly pathetic. It does have a 624MHz processor and 64MB of RAM – hell, many people use similar or lesser specs as their desktop machine and get by fine. Dillo and Konqueror may not be the best browsers around when it comes to rendering (although Konqueror is pretty good), but at least you don’t need a portable supercomputer to use them.