Mozilla to Develop Mobile Firefox

Kelson writes "Mozilla has announced a new initiative to bring Mozilla to the mobile web, including a fully functional mobile version of Firefox (yes, with extensions). The focus will be part of Mozilla 2, the big revision coming after Gecko 1.9 and Firefox 3. Minimo, the previous attempt to port Mozilla to mobile platforms, is apparently dead, but 'has already provided us with valuable information about how Gecko operates in mobile environments, has helped us reduce footprint, and has given us a platform for initial experimentation in user experience.'"

By the time....

[CRCulver (715279)]

I'll bet that at the sluggish rate Gecko development proceeds, by the time the mobile version appears, mobile devices will have almost the power of today's stationary hardware.

Re:

[Kelson (129150)]

I'll bet that at the sluggish rate Gecko development proceeds, by the time the mobile version appears, mobile devices will have almost the power of today's stationary hardware.

Wow! Someone who actually read the article!

Re:By the time....

[AKAImBatman (238306)]

FTFA:

Getting a no-compromise web experience on devices requires significant memory (>=64MB) as well as significant CPU horsepower. High end devices today are just approaching these requirements and will be commonplace soon For example, the iPhone has 128MB of DRAM and somewhere between a 400 to 600 MHz processor. It is somewhere between 10x-100x slower on scripting benchmarks than a new MacBook Pro and somewhere between 3-5x slower than an old T40 laptop on the same wifi network. But rapid improvements in mobile processors will close this gap within a few years.

I find this to be a rather shocking statement. The author is claiming that a handheld that meets the minimum requirements for a modern web browser on a desktop OS is not quite sufficient to run an embedded version? If that's really the consensus of the Mozilla developers, then my opinion is that they need to reevaluate how their approaching phone handsets. It is not a desktop platform, nor will you get the best experience by treating a handset as a desktop platform. As Apple and Opera have been showing with their embedded browsers, the interface should be designed around the phone rather than forcing the phone to be designed around the interface.

Re:

[mrslacker (1122161)]

Perhaps (time, not reading the article), but there's another important player here that should be blatantly obvious, but no one has mentioned. That is of course Mozilla Foundation's best friend, Google. In particular, their emphasis on mobile platforms and Gphone. Guess what browser the gphone will have. In any case, there'll be a good deal of leverage and motivation from Google to make this happen sometime soon.

Re:

[Jussi K. Kojootti (646145)]

Saying "Nokia uses browser X" doesn't really make your point since Nokia uses pretty much all major rendering engines in their products, including gecko...

it's a pattern of behaviour

[User 956 (568564)]

Mozilla has announced a new initiative to bring Mozilla to the mobile web, including a fully functional mobile version of Firefox (yes, with extensions).

The thing I like about Firefox, is it's something people can really embrace, and extend.

Re:

[Daimanta (1140543)]

Hey there Bill. Wait, what are you doing with that extinguisher. No, wait, STOP, WAAAAAGGGGHH

reduced footprint?

[moderatorrater (1095745)]

I wish they would carry those lessons over to firefox sometime soon.

Re:

[Fallingcow (213461)]

I'm hoping that I can run the mobile version on my desktop.

Re:reduced footprint?

[JerkBoB (7130)]

Damn, you guys beat me to it.

I suppose it's obvious, though...

mjmac@ganymede:~$ ps axwu | grep firefox
mjmac 13089 0.9 11.3 786244 232776 ? Sl Oct09 16:47 /usr/lib/firefox/firefox-bin

Isn't firefox supposed to be the lightweight alternative to Mozilla? *cough*

What is with the Mozilla naming conventions?

[R2.0 (532027)]

Is it really necessary to consult a chart to make sense of their products?

"Mozilla 2, the big revision coming after Gecko 1.9 and Firefox 3."

So 2 is after 1.9, but is also after 3. But it's Firefox 3. But the product named Mozilla, the suite, stopped at 1.7.X, and was replaced by Seamonkey 1.0, which is really Mozilla 1.8.

Anybody?

Re:What is with the Mozilla naming conventions?

[domatic (1128127)]

"Firefox 3" refers to an upcoming product release that will use the "Gecko 1.9" html/web renderer. "Mozilla 2" apparently refers to the APIs and release products based on them that will be what developers focus on once current developments (FF3 and Gecko 1.9) are finished.

Re:What is with the Mozilla naming conventions?

[savala (874118)]

Mozilla 2 == Gecko 2. Mozilla is the catchall name for the platform, with a version number equal to that of the rendering engine.

Individual products (such as Firefox, SeaMonkey, Camino, Thunderbird, etc, etc, etc) all have their own versioning scheme, as decided upon by their respective marketing people. This is the only number end-users should care about (for their own favorite product), but developers can always refer back to the gecko/mozilla version to know how these products relate to each other.

Re:

[drew (2081)]

The only thing I can figure out is that they found inspiration in Sun's version numbering for Java releases, and decided that they had to do one better. Or is that 0.1?

Re:

[toleraen (831634)]

Replace Gecko with the Linux kernel and Firefox/Seamonkey/Mozilla with Redhat/Ubuntu/Slackware.

Back end --> Front end. Where's the confusion here?

Reduced footprint

[jimktrains (838227)]

Perhapses that knowledge could allow them to reduce the footprint of the full sized version, maybe? Hopefully?

Re:

[Vexor (947598)]

They have a long way to go to catch up with Opera's performance. Excellent browser for viewing sites with loads of images/video etc.

Re:

[wizardforce (1005805)]

Perhapses that knowledge could allow them to reduce the footprint of the full sized version, maybe? Hopefully?

There seems to be a problem with Firefox's spell checker too. That should be fixed in the next release.

Re:

[jimktrains (838227)]

" 'Perhapses that knowledge could allow them to reduce the footprint of the full sized version, maybe? Hopefully?'

There seems to be a problem with Firefox's spell checker too. That should be fixed in the next release."

Was that a knock at me? ispell, openoffice, and firefox all found nothing wrong with what I wrote. As for the spell checker, I find it quite useful and well designed (although there are somethings that trip it up).

Re:Reduced footprint

[Kalriath (849904)]

It's not a bug, he was just spell checking using the Gollum dictionary. The English ones don't include "perhapses".

My Precccccciooooouuuuuuusssss?

Wonder if it's the same as MicroB on the N800...

[IANAAC (692242)]

I've been running MicroB on the Nokia N800 and it now handles pretty much any ajax site I throw at it. I had problems with many ajax sites using Opera 9, not to mention Minimo, but MicroB handles them nicely. Not many extensions available yet though.

Re:

[Constantine XVI (880691)]

Yeah, it's Mozilla-based. Suprised it's not WebKit/KHTML (Safari, Konqueror and "Series 60 Web Browser"), given that Nokia puts it on all their S60 phones.

Re:

[jrumney (197329)]

IIRC, Nokia was the main developer behind the GTK port of WebKit, which was still a work in progress a couple of months ago when I looked at it. Maybe they've abandoned it now that MicroB has come along.

Already using Mozilla Browser on my N800

[c41rn (880778)]

Check out MicroB [maemo.org], a mozilla-based browser for the Maemo platform on the N800. I prefer it to the default Opera-based browser that the N800 ships with. It's based on Gecko 1.9.

what is the best broswer at the moment?

[schnikies79 (788746)]

I have a cingular 8125 I use occasionally (when wifi is avail, no way I am paying mobile internet fee's) and this would be great. I have IE and Opera mobile on it, but end up mostly using IE. Opera mini was nice on my flip phone, but Opera Mobile doesn't render well at all. I have to side scroll all the time, and I can't stand side scrolling. The tabs and buttons keep it on my phone though.

Any recommendations on what the best browser avail right now is?

Re:

[ForestGrump (644805)]

I'd recommend a mix between PocketIE and opera. PocketIE does better on some pages, while Opera is better with others.

There are some PIE modifications out there that add tabs and such. Sorry that I can't give any names/links as I haven't used them in about 2 years.

Grump

Google Phone

[Frosty Piss (770223)]

This isn't surprising considering Google's recent purchase of Mozilla, and the search giant's new focus on mobile with their Google Phone.

Odd item in Related Links

[Kelson (129150)]

Anyone else think that "Compare prices on Mozilla" is an odd choice to appear in the list of Related Links?

"Let's see, you can get it from this site for $0. But this one is offering it for $0. Or you could go over here and get it for $0, but they charge $0 for shipping. Hmm, I think I'll go with the place selling it for $29.95."

Re:

[Goaway (82658)]

You only now noticed the "compare prices on" links that have been in ever story for years now, and that are nearly always incredibly inappropriate and hilarious?

A new name?

[Arghdee (813921)]

I suggest they call it:

MObile FirefOx

Then, we can abbreviate that to Mofo.

Re:

[Anonymous Coward]

The Mozilla Foundation is already sometimes called MoFo, and it requires a much less retarded interpretation.

Re:A new name?

[butterwise (862336)]

I prefer FoxBile.

Minimo...was a disaster!

[PortHaven (242123)]

A huge broken nightmare. Wouldn't even uninstall...

*shudders*

Re:

[speculatrix (678524)]

minimo has been working fine for me on Angstrom distro for Zaurus - just as well, 'cos it's the only useful browser in the Angstrom distribution - they chose not to include any old libraries so the old opera 7 from the Sharp original distro is not compatible, nor is netfront, and konqueror sucks, and firefox segfaults!

Peer into the future

[Bobfrankly1 (1043848)]

Apple: Iphone burns up in owner's pocket, flames burn up to his neck
First slashdot post:
"Liar Liar pants on..."
...followed shortly by...
"Was he running FireFox?"
-

Is this because of the iPhone's Safari?

[MSRedfox (1043112)]

I've used mobile versions of Opera, InternetExplorer, Minimo, and now Safari (and a few other off-brand browsers). Up until Safari, I found Opera to be the best for mobile browsing, but even it was lacking. The iPhone's Safari seems pretty good so far, still not perfect, but better then the rest. But with Safari, you're limited to using it only on the iPhone (or iPod touch). Hopefully this new development from Mozilla will offer a nice high quality mobile browser that is compatible with multiple devices. I'm looking forward to a browser war for the mobile market, its about time we got a choice of good quality browsers instead of being stuck with low grade versions that can't even render simple pages well.

Let the browsers wars start again.

Re:

[Reverberant (303566)]

But with Safari, you're limited to using it only on the iPhone (or iPod touch).

Let the browsers wars start again.

True for Safari proper, but don't forget that Webkit has been ported to Symbian [nokia.com]

Hope there will be a Firebug-like dev tool

[ishmalius (153450)]

It would be really awesome if a mobile tool gets the same kind of debugging support that currently exists with Firefox and Firebug. Nothing comparable exists in the desktop browser world. What once involved writing for IE first, then adding W3 features later, now is developing on FF/FB, and then -porting- to IE. What a wonderful change has occurred in the dev landscape.

Ever looked at /. on a WinCE mobile?

[(H)elix1 (231155)]

With phones becoming more common as internet devices, you would think sites would be a bit more friendly to those sorts of devices. Yes, /. does have a 'palm' version.... but using the low bandwidth variant for normal surfing is just painful on the embedded version of IE my Cingular 8525 bundles with Windows Mobile. The low bandwidth version style sheets list the article summary...

one
word
per
line

For whatever reason, the comments render correctly on it. To think I got this phone because it *has* wifi. Arg

Reduced memory footprint??

[Em Ellel (523581)]

Firefox on mobile devices? Great, but where do I get 2GB of ram for my treo?

They have tries before

[suv4x4 (956391)]

But failed since they couldn't reduce the footprint and achieve acceptable performance.

The reason they are trying again, is that after Firefox 3 comes the time of Tamarin, the ECMAScript engine in Flash Player, which will also power the Firefox releases after 3. Spidermonkey and Tamarin is like night and day.

So, in fact, Adobe saved the day here.

Re:

[RebelWebmaster (628941)]

Tamarin has very little to nothing to do with it. It has everything to do with massively cutting back on XPCOM usage within the codebase and other architectural changes which couldn't be made in a 1.x build for compatibility reasons.

In fact, Tamarin currently needs a fair amount of optimization to reach parity with Spidermonkey (in the case of untyped data anyway).

time could be better spent elsewhere

[Exter-C (310390)]

I am all for open source going into new markets, I do feel that in the case of mozilla with firefox that they should really focus on resolving many of the bugs and really working on providing a rock solid, secure fast and stable "full scale" browser. Once they have finalised that work on a mobile browser.

Webkit

[Anonymous Coward]

Mozilla fears Webkit. Webkit went from not interesting to the new star of the future very quickly. First the KDE project made their peace with Webkit with Trolltech announcing it'll include it in the next Qt release. Following that were people doing proof-of-concept ports of Webkit to the Gnome Mobile platform and showing that it was far less ressource intensive and faster than Mozilla or Opera on mobiles. The same could be shown for the OLPC. Following that, quite some companies recently started investing

Re:

[Paradigm_Complex (968558)]

It's quite possible to have different people working on different things at the same time. Funky how there's been updates to fx2 while fx3 was in development, isn't it? I agree fx still needs a good bit of work, and awesomely enough it's getting it irrelevant of whether or not another related project is underway.

Re:Why have 23 flavors when you can't do vanilla?

[DrXym (126579)]

I use Firefox all day, every day sometimes with 20 tabs open. I won't say it never crashes but it manages to last a hell of a lot longer than 3 hours on average. I don't have issues with the memory either considering the number of tabs, session history, cache and so on.

If memory really bothers people they should turn their settings down and modify their browsing behaviour since Firefox takes the sensible default approach of using whatever memory you have to optimize the user experience.

Re:

[Paradigm_Complex (968558)]

I know it's tempting, but try not to feed the trolls. Sadly it doesn't seem to accomplish much except encourage them.

The more, the merrier

[Kelson (129150)]

The more fully-capable mobile browsers are out there, the less we need to worry about a return to the bad old days when people designed one version of a site for Netscape and another version for Internet Explorer, then let one version bitrot. We've already seen the first rumblings of iPhone-only sites [meyerweb.com].

A mobile web with Opera, Firefox and Safari? It'll be a lot harder to justify picking one and locking out the rest.

Re:

[webmaster404 (1148909)]

Have you tried FF3? It is super fast compared to FF2, which was faster then FF1. In a world where speed is everything and as Vista shows, you can always tell people to buy a new computer/ram/CPU/graphics card using 50 MB of memory really isn't that much when you get the speed and speed has historically been the reason why people used IE, it was what stopped me from going all FF back when I used Windows, because FF is so poorly optimized in the default state. And for bugs, sure they are not all fixed but its

Re:

[Kalriath (849904)]

You're referring to PIE (Pocket Internet Explorer. Tastes bad, not to be confused with Apple PIE or Apricot PIE).

Details page: http://www.microsoft.com/windowsmobile/microsoftprograms/iemobile.mspx [microsoft.com].

It's ultra basic. No popup support, no Flash, no ... wait a minute... can I get it for Windows XP?