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Mozilla Hitting 'Brick Walls' Getting Firefox on Phones
Posted by
Zonk
on Sun Mar 02, 2008 02:19 PM
from the watch-dino-hit-brick-wall dept.
from the watch-dino-hit-brick-wall dept.
meteorit writes "Mozilla has been working on a mobile version of Firefox since last year, and is now looking to repeat the success of Firefox on the PC. Although development seems not to have been completed, it is known that informal negotiations have already started with mobile network operators. Firefox Mobile is scheduled to be launched by the end of the year and the inaugural version will be compatible with the Linux and Windows Mobile operating systems. Work is already underway to determine what the browser's UI will look like. In the meantime those negotiations seem to be hitting 'brick walls', as cellphone operators resist the intrusion of the open web onto their platforms."
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[+]
Feedback Sought for Proposed Mobile Firefox UIs 28 comments
jangel writes to give us a look at the prototype UIs for Mobile Firefox, which is currently under development. Mozilla project lead Doug Turner has asked for opinions on the design. Quoting:
"Comments on the Wiki provide an idea of the choices the developers still have to make. For example, should the chevron at the right of the toolbar open a history page listing the most recently viewed pages, or -- as on desktop Firefox -- merely a list of most frequently typed URLs? And should "full screen" mode hide everything except the page being browsed, or retain the lowermost toolbar? Turner writes that while the user interfaces shown are merely starting points, 'going from the pretty pictures that Photoshop can produce to something that is functional is easy with the Mozilla platform. Building functional prototypes ... using only Javascript, XML, CSS, and images is really awesome.'"
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As of now (Score:5, Informative)
As a loyal Firefox user, I'd LOVE to see a mobile version if it can compete with the speed of Opera.
Re:As of now (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re:As of now (Score:5, Interesting)
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Re:As of now (Score:4, Informative)
Getting symbian updates, even on unlocked phone is entirely at the whim of the manufacture, which usually doesn't happen.
But yeah, the cost of an unlocked phone is prohibitive.
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Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:As of now (Score:5, Informative)
I could seriously become a fanboy at this rate.
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Re:As of now (Score:5, Informative)
Opera Mini is a completely different product.
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Re: (Score:2)
Re:As of now (Score:4, Informative)
Opera Mini is a Web browser that renders specially processed pages from Opera's proxy server to reduce rendering & download time. It's written in J2ME (Java 2 Mobile Edition).
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Re:As of now (Score:4, Informative)
I don't really see why a central proxy is significantly faster than a phone with a well-designed name resolver plus a well-designed browser, and a web server which supports Content-Encoding:gzip.
I'm sure it's obvious by now, but scaling down the images will reduce the bandwidth way more than gzipping them. Also, the proxy could add gzip compression even if the web server doesn't use it.
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Image recompression (Score:5, Informative)
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Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Apache does not compress by default. You have to install mod_deflate [apache.org] and set up the DEFLATE output handler first. The sample instructions [apache.org] are a bit simplistic, but they should work.
As someone else noted in one of the sibling replies, gzipping images isn't going to get you anywhere... the Opera proxies actually downgrade the image quality (and size? I'm not sure, I've never used Opera Mini) to improve s
Re:As of now (Score:4, Interesting)
I value my privacy, but have judged that, so long as I avoid sending sensitive passwords, bank card data etc., I am happy for a bunch of Swedish nerds to have access to my mobile browsing data. A damn sight happier than letting my phone company have the same data.
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Re:As of now (Score:5, Informative)
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Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Actually, they're Norwegian nerds.
Re:As of now (Score:5, Informative)
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Re:As of now (Score:4, Insightful)
I'm shocked they didn't have a company lined up before the effort to port was started.
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Re: (Score:3, Informative)
No, they have not designed it to work in a low memory environment. The minimum memory requirement for mobile Firefox is the same as for the desktop version: 64 MB. That means that mobile Firefox will be limited to running on smartphones at first. In a few years, even typical mobile phones should come with enough memory to run Firefox. I would think the bigger problems would be the small screen and small keyboard.
It is common to see complaints about Firefox's memory usage on Slashdot, but in reality very fe
Because (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Because (Score:5, Insightful)
And from their perspective -they're right. If you don't control the application you want to make sure that the people who do control it are either under your influence, or have similar goals. Open source isn't under their influence, and the goals of open source are diametrically opposite of the manufacturers'.
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Re:Because (Score:5, Insightful)
Many will think enough is enough with paying $3 for some crappy midi file for a ring tone and want to run their phone like their pcs.
I for one refuse to buy high end phones for this reason. I want to run my own apps and not pay through the nose for their drm infested crappy software.
If you read my posts I am in favor of the free market and not some gnu zealot but when a company dictates how to use something I paid for and halts innovation I get mad.
I am not the only one and a truly free phone will attract all the developers and therefore bring all teh apps and cool games. After this their business model is done. You can't just lock a whole market up. Eventually someone like lets say google and their andriod sdk will come along and provide serious competition.
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Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Yeah, lets all bow down at the alter of google. They'll just force us to view ads while data mining our conversations and text messages. I'd sure like to get in on that.
Re:Because (Score:5, Insightful)
It's a sinking ship you cling to, just in case you hadn't noticed.
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it works in the rest of the world (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re:Because (Score:5, Interesting)
It's highly unusual for any solution to be effective 100% of the time in all possible cases. So it shouldn't come as a surprise that capitalism doesn't work in certain cases. The key is to recognize those cases, and enact legislation which makes up for those shortcomings (e.g. environmental protection laws, fisheries management, anti-trust laws). Damning capitalism entirely because it fails in certain limited cases is throwing the baby out with the bathwater, and about as ideologically boneheaded as believing capitalism is always the best solution. What's needed are laws assuring the phone carrier market operates efficiently - allow people to port their phone numbers, allow non-vendor hardware to operate over the networks, and a cell-phone version of network neutrality where any non-vendor apps can run over the network.
I haven't quite decided yet about multi-year contracts since they are a legitimately chosen by customers - the problem being that apparently 99% of US customers would rather amortize their purchase and pay more, rather than pay the phone costs lump sum up front for less. At this point the only contract legislation I would support is forcing the telecos to give me a discount once I am out of contract or if I bring my own phone, since then they are no longer subsidizing the phone cost with my monthly fee. As it is right now, I pay the same monthly fee as someone whose monthly fee is subsidizing a $500 phone, even though I bought and paid for my phone myself.
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Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
You win the gold star for today. A man talks about the clear problems with capitalism, and you turn him around and say "BUT COMMUNISM IS BAD." It's called a straw man. You can't argue against the center by saying he belongs to the edge.
Then again, you won over somebody, as you got modded up.
Re:Because (Score:4, Funny)
If you read my posts I am in favor of the free market and not some gnu zealot but when a company dictates how to use something I paid for and halts innovation I get mad." - Billy Gates
I love the irony.
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Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Since recently there has been a ruling to the effect of preventing carriers from locking out equipment not sold by them, there will be pure equipment makers who will find generic software offerings such as FireFox mobile quite attractive when adding value to their hardware offerings. The first one to shed their fear of control loss will be the first one to find that giving the consumer what they want often leads to consumer loyalty and enduring profits.
Re: (Score:2)
If that's really the case, then why the need for the negotiation mentioned in the topic - let people download it themselves. I suspect, however, that they're looking for some sort of bundling deal.
Re:Firefox that cannot connect is next to useless (Score:4, Interesting)
That would drive me nuts though. Can you download 'offending' apps to a computer then transfer it locally?
I am angry just thinking about that error message.
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Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
They don't necessarily make more money being consumer friendly, and cutting a little on costs here might net them more expenses in the long run. They don't make money by allowing the market being competitive. Both are benefits to the consumer, not the service provider. The article explains more along th
Re: (Score:2, Informative)
Should the bottom line always be profits?
Practically speaking, of course, it always is. But in the end, it all comes down to a class war between the wealthy and the not-as-wealthy in society. Anti-competitive trends in a market mean more profits for the "company", which translates primarily to more profits for the wealthy executives and investors associated with the company. Competitive trends, on the other hand, mean better value for the people who use the good or service, which translates to a smalle
Re: (Score:2)
But that's what the bottom line is, that's what the expression means.
I realize that we might not be disagreeing on several points.
I think part of the problem is that there aren't very many wireless carriers, though oddly enough, there are more wireless carriers in more areas than there are wired ISPs. I think the hope was that the 700MHz spectrum would shake things up a bit, but there was the same hope with WiMax too.
Don't forget the iPhone (Score:5, Interesting)
Sheldon
Re: (Score:2, Interesting)
NoScript [noscript.net] would also help in that respect.
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Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Just another reason to unlock your phone (Score:3, Insightful)
Re: (Score:2)
If the hardware maker is really into screwing the user, something phone makers will consider business as usual, they will do it regardless of what users want.
It's important to read the article (Score:5, Insightful)
So let's assume that the title of his little rant is indicative of what he thought he was writing about. Somehow he seems to be drawing the conclusion that, sans an open-source web browser, people aren't allowed to browse websites of their own choosing! I'd love to see Firefox on mobile platforms; but really - even my friends with Windows Mobile phones are checking their Gmail; I see them looking at all sorts of odd pages; and I have never heard them complain that their carrier won't let them visit any arbitrary page. I do hear them complaining about the crappy internet experience they're having, due to the poor design of the browser; but that's a completely different subject (and while Firefox could potentially address that, Safari already does - and it's got nothing to do with the openness of the browser, per se, anyway).
When the web was first getting onto mobile phones, I realize people weren't given free reign in their browsing habits - but c'mon, that was three or four years ago.
Re: (Score:2)
More generally, of course, the cellular providers want to be the one deciding which content to block, not the
Their phones?? (Score:5, Interesting)
Can you imagine living in a world where you could not develop programs for your own computer?
Fuck em!
Seriously port firefox to andriod only. If enough developers switch to a platform that allows them to compete and run their own software the users will follow. I know many here hate Java but why can't we live in a world that is free?
Would you rather own a locked down phone or one where all the free apps on the internet run on? I would pick the latter.
Consumers run WIndows over Linux and MacOSX because its where the apps are at. The phone companies are going to create the ultimate competitor if they are not careful and dictate to the rest of us what to use.
Yet another reason... (Score:4, Insightful)
Re: (Score:2)
The lack of a mouse is not a
Symbian OS? (Score:4, Interesting)
Does someone have some information about the "why?" (I know you can tell me that if I am willing, I can start developping it myself, but actually I have to much projects to cope with...)
And another question: I own a Nokia E-61. If Firefox is not planed for Symbian OS, I am willing to install Linux Mobile on it. Can someone give me a pointer to what I should do to do this?
Re:Symbian OS? (Score:5, Insightful)
The documentation is atrocious - there aren't many examples in it, and as opposed to Win32, where you can usually figure out how to use a function from the MSDN library's description of it, trying to do that will generally result in something that fails in an obscure way. As a rule the only sure way to find out how something is done is to find someone else who's already done it and try to figure out what they did that makes it work.
Symbian has only recently ported stdlib to it properly, in what I presume is an act of desperation to try and get people to develop for it. V9 solves the problem where all applications had to be DLLs with no global storage allowed, but it also adds a particularly paranoid code-signing system where your app has to be signed before it is possible to run it outside of the emulator.
That's been my experience, anyway. However - there is a whitepaper on how Opera was ported to Symbian. I can't find a freely accessible version of it right now, but it's a fascinating read and it illustrates full well why porting Mozilla would be very, very difficult.
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Re:Symbian OS? (Score:4, Insightful)
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Google filters mobile search results (Score:4, Interesting)
I pay a flat rate of approx £10 (US $20) to fetch up to 3GB/month, which I've never reached on it. Therefore, I'm quite happy with the price, and I don't worry at all about data charges.
It's not a walled garden: the whole internet is accessible. That's nice.
But when I visit good old Google, at their normal URLs, I find the search results are filtered by Google. I'm not sure, it may be that Google's "Safe Search" feature is switched on when using a mobile. But I notice that there are no settings to turn it off: I'm stuck with filtered results, whether I like them or not. And there's no text saying the results are filtered.
Another thing I noticed is that the BBC News page redirects to a "mobile-optimised" version which doesn't have what I want on it. That's very annoying; I would really like to be able to visit the normal page.
I wouldn't be surprised if this has nothing to do with the mobile network, and is done by the web sites themselves detecting a mobile client. It is very annoying, especially when the site in question provides no way to access the normal site.
-- Jamie
Re:Vapor Cannot Hit A Brick Wall (Score:4, Informative)
You might want to check your figures.
For PCs:
Firefox 2.0.0.12 installer [mozilla.com]: 5.75 MB (6,029,648 bytes)
Safari 3.x Beta installer [apple.com]: 15.6 MB (16,398,632 bytes)
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