Mozilla to Develop Mobile Firefox 152
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.'"
Comment removed (Score:3, Insightful)
Why have 23 flavors when you can't do vanilla? (Score:1, Insightful)
Re:Why have 23 flavors when you can't do vanilla? (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:By the time.... (Score:5, Insightful)
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:reduced footprint? (Score:4, Insightful)
I suppose it's obvious, though...
mjmac@ganymede:~$ ps axwu | grep firefox
mjmac 13089 0.9 11.3 786244 232776 ? Sl Oct09 16:47
Isn't firefox supposed to be the lightweight alternative to Mozilla? *cough*
Webkit (Score:2, Insightful)
If you now consider that both KDE and Gnome don't like Mozilla very much (because it suffers from extensive NIH), you'll realize that if Mozilla doesn't get their act together, they'll lose the Linux market to Webkit. And Linux is the next big thing in the Mobile world, so they'll also lose the mobile market. And from there it's only a short way to losing a lot of hobbyist developers, since those use Linux.
Re:What about Opera?!? (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:By the time.... (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Why have 23 flavors when you can't do vanilla? (Score:4, Insightful)
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.