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.'"

Re:Reduced footprint

[Vexor]

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:What is with the Mozilla naming conventions?

[domatic]

"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]

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:Fix the rest of the problems first

[webmaster404]

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 better then the alternatives, Opera which is closed source, IE which is insecure 100% of the time and doesn't run on Linux, Konquorer which is lean and fast, but lacks support and a flash plugin, and I don't like the UI of Safari, plus it doesn't work on Linux anyways. Sure there are always "alternitive" browsers like Epiphany and Galelion but they are based on Gecko and work just about the same as FF. So yes, FF isn't the greatest, but its better then the competition and I hope that the new Minimo will help optimize the rendering speed of FF, something that I really want more then code optimization for resources

Re:What is with the Mozilla naming conventions?

[Arterion]

The Mozilla/5.0 part is a little confusing, but I think that's a hold-over from Netscape days. But if you look you'll see rv:1.8.1.7, which is the version of Gecko, which they seem to be calling "Mozilla" in this summary.

Re:Is this because of the iPhone's Safari?

[Reverberant]

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]