Mozilla Hitting 'Brick Walls' Getting Firefox on Phones 228
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."
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)
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:As of now (Score:5, Informative)
I could seriously become a fanboy at this rate.
Re:As of now (Score:5, Informative)
Opera Mini is a completely different product.
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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, 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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Opera is Norwegian, and Opera Mini doesn't do ssl so you can't do your banking through the Mini.
Re:As of now (Score:5, Informative)
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I borked that one.... (Score:2)
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Actually, they're Norwegian nerds.
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I'm not really using a mobile browser for its speed, the main benefit for me is that it saves me c.£150 a year. And by 'quicker' I mean in comparison to the browser the phone comes with. In, you know, real life.
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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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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
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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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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
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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'.
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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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.
it works in the rest of the world (Score:5, Insightful)
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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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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Mozilla being upset about cell phone companies not deploying firefox is about as silly as them being upset about Microsoft bundling it with windows. What did you expect?
What they need is a PC-based installer that will bluetooth sync with a phone, identify the appropriate version to install, hack into it (with the owner's permission), and install the browser. Then it will take off. That's exactly how it took off on the PC - i
What DRM (Score:2)
I think it's just on the lower end phones that the DRM lock-in is enforced. I have a Sprint Mogul (HTC Hermes/Titan) running WM6. I have installed literally hundreds of apps and have yet to find one that won't install just by copying a CAB over and clicking it. And with a single registry edit on the phone (also open access) I got unlimited PC tethering on EVDO. Last week I installed a homebrew firmware from that activated the
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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.
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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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Bollocks (Score:2)
it has sfa to do with free software.
There are three problems.
1. the american market is a fucking nightmare. American consumers are hopelessly naive and continue to allow the operators to run their little walled gardens.
2. Firefox is not renowned for it's ability to run in 16mb of ram. Opera can. Works great. Cut the bloat.
3. Naivete within mozilla org. Wtf would you start with the US.market? everyone in the mobile world knows it's sewn up. It's only
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windows mobile? Linux? Wtf? symbian epoc is the operating system on most phones now...
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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
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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
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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.
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But that's what the bottom line is, that's what the expression means.
I understand that that's the common usage of the expression, but it can also be used to mean "the deciding factor", which is what I intended. All I'm suggesting is that in an ideal world perhaps money wouldn't be the only thing that corporations considered when making business decisions.
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But that's what the bottom line is, that's what the expression means.
I understand that that's the common usage of the expression, but it can also be used to mean "the deciding factor", which is what I intended. All I'm suggesting is that in an ideal world perhaps money wouldn't be the only thing that corporations considered when making business decisions.
It's not common usage, it's the origin of the term. Just like "comparing apples to oranges" is based on fruit.
Corporations are legally obligated to consider their bottom line before all other considerations. Any corporation you see that is doing something charitable is doing that because they have a plausible theory that it will help their bottom line. There are no exceptions, because if you see exceptions they quickly go away due to a shareholder lawsuit or SEC smackdown.
For example: GM and Wal-Mart en
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The incorrectly guessed company would first have to approach cell phone manufacturers to attempt to get their OS installed in order to even test the browser, let alone install it as the default.
Don't forget the iPhone (Score:5, Interesting)
Sheldon
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NoScript [noscript.net] would also help in that respect.
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Open?!? (Score:2)
Given that without Apple's corporate blessing, to develop apps on the iphone up to now has required buffer exploits and security holes, I am having trouble understandig how this counts as "open". I have a Sprint Mogul (HTC Hermes/Titan) running WM6. I have installed literally hundreds of apps and have yet to find one that won't install just by copying a CAB over and clicking it (including, yes, Opera Mobile and Opera Mini as a MIDLet). And wit
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This is a very interesting software for mobile web.
At work, we do use that as a HTTP WAN accelerator (dedicated city-city links, quite expensive ones) and it's a life saver.
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The lack of ad blocking doesn't bother me on Mobile Safari as much as it does on the desktop. I tend to double-tap and zoom in on divs, which essentially obscures most ads. I'd actually like to see the same zooming feature on desktop browsers, maybe with the option of auto-resizing the window rather than zooming.
Just another reason to unlock your phone (Score:3, Insightful)
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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.
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More generally, of course, the cellular providers want to be the one deciding which content to block, not the
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Safari has spotty coverage (Score:2)
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).
Safari doesn't work in Vermont, most of New Hampshire and Maine, or other areas not served by AT&T Inc. From the legend at AT&T's coverage viewer [att.com]:
So for the next four and a half years while the iPhone is still exclusive to AT&T, Safari won't work in those areas unless someone makes a phone-sized Windows PC that can run the Windows version of
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.
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As a pretext, I agree with the benefits of openness and software freedom. The point of my response is to address where users who are not tech-geeks would prefer a closed solution.
I thought we owned all own phones like we do computers? Why can't we run our own software? Or develop software for them?
We can't run our own software because it hasn't been tested. If loading and executing applications on phones was trivial, you'd see text-message exploits that load ad-software onto your phone and then send copies of the exploited message to your entire contact list. I am speculating here, but the base Operating Systems running
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We can't run our own software because it hasn't been tested. If loading and executing applications on phones was trivial, you'd see text-message exploits that load ad-software onto your phone and then send copies of the exploited message to your entire contact list
Uh, what? First off, I can run any app on my (cheap, generic, Nokia) phone that I send via a bluetooth message. I can't send an app via an SMS because they are limited to 160 bytes. I think it's possible to send them via MMS, but I've not tried.
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Yet another reason... (Score:4, Insightful)
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The lack of a mouse is not a
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It's dumb to use a mobile phone for leisure-browsing, that doesn't make it useless to have access to a "real" web browser in the phone.
Wouldn't buy one of those "smart"-phones though... They don't offer much useful functionality over a regular one. With my mainstream, non-3G, Sony-Ericsson I can access the web, search maps, listen to music, use SSH, have a calendar, adressbook, rea
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.
Re:Symbian OS? (Score:4, Insightful)
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I don't care about waiting for the phone companies to agree. It's my phone, I own it, I pay for unlimited data, and I'l
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ok so you agree that you can't install Firefox because Firefox for Symbian doesn't exist?
> Aside: Nokia's "Web" browser is pretty much the best mobile browser I've ever used.
Stop kidding!! Opera is quite good (and of course far better than the symbian browser), but there are still some problems!
Where can I change the user agent? How can I get ride of the few bugs which are poising my browsing experience? Why is it so slow? Why *each time* I am
its all about control, of your money (Score:2, Insightful)
Opera != just a browser. Firefox can't compete (Score:2, Interesting)
I'm not sure that Firefox will be able to compete in this arena without creating a proxy server system of their own. I'm not against them trying, I just want to make it clear to those of you who haven't used
Completely misleading headline (Score:2)
Some blogger is *talking* about brick walls and speculating that they might make it hard to get Firefox on phones. There is no data showing that is actually the case.
A tinderbox for burning cash (Score:2)
Some blogger is *talking* about brick walls and speculating that they might make it hard to get Firefox on phones. There is no data showing that is actually the case.
In the United States, the CDMA networks of Verizon and Sprint have better coverage than the GSM/UMTS networks of AT&T and T-Mobile. Mobile phones designed for use on CDMA networks tend to use Qualcomm's BREW system. Every time you recompile and relink a program on a BREW phone, you have to pay 4 USD to get the new binary signed so that you can run it on your own phone. Distributing a binary to testers is even more expensive. See criticism of BREW on Wikipedia [wikipedia.org] and its references for details.
I've actually used Mozilla on a phone... (Score:2)
First of all, it's incredibly slow. Page renders take a very, very long time. The interface is also pretty bad on a Smartphone, but perhaps is better on a PocketPC. It also is quite buggy, and locks up / crashes frequently. But then, it is a beta.
Really, I don't
Vapor Cannot Hit A Brick Wall (Score:2)
Apple always pushed WebKit to be both smaller and faster in every way possible. Then last year they shipped it on a 400 MHz, 128MB RAM, 4GB storage device and it runs great. Obviously they had mobiles in mind from the start of the WebKit project. But even on Windows, Safari is twice as fas
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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It's even larger if you get the version bundled with Quicktime [apple.com]: 38.3MB (40,133,928 bytes).
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
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I see no problem with Mozilla creating a version of Firefox for Symbian and WM, everyone who wants it if they feel they need to and that's the end of the story... don't see what the carriers have to do with it - it's none of the bleedin' business. No different to Opera 5
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