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)
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Wow! Someone who actually read the article!
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.
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I have never been a huge proponent of mobile web applications. I think phones already feel heavy and bloated with too many features, and having a memory-happy app from Gecko sitting on it isn't the direction I'd like to see.
it's a pattern of behaviour (Score:5, Funny)
The thing I like about Firefox, is it's something people can really embrace, and extend.
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reduced footprint? (Score:5)
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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*
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Just wait until FireFox 3 comes around and that old adage of reusing old hardware goes out the window with the Windows XP requirements. Does it all make you wonder? Makes me wonder.
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Those of us who know, would have to say that firefox was a fast lightweight alternative to seamonkey after the mozilla application suit was terminated and seamonkey rose from it's ashed. well that is if we want people to compare Firefox to mozilla that is.
Why have 23 flavors when you can't do vanilla? (Score:1, Insightful)
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Maybe, but in this case it doesn't make sense. Firefox contains (a) memory leak(s), which make it neccessary to restart it regularly. Computer users put up with such, to put it frankly, piece of shit programming, but the users of other appliances won't, even if a modern cellphone is essentially a computer with radio receiver and transmitter. So, until the leak(s) have been plugged, there is no point in putting effo
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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.
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What is with the Mozilla naming conventions? (Score:4, Interesting)
"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? (Score:4, Informative)
They could always (Score:1)
Re:What is with the Mozilla naming conventions? (Score:5, Informative)
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.
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Simple.
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Back end --> Front end. Where's the confusion here?
Reduced footprint (Score:5, Interesting)
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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).
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Re:Reduced footprint (Score:4, Funny)
My Precccccciooooouuuuuuusssss?
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Thunderbird (Score:1)
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IME, that annoyance is limited to the Linux versions of Thunderbird & Firefox. They behave as you'd expect out-of-the-box on Windows & Mac OS X.
Wonder if it's the same as MicroB on the N800... (Score:3, Interesting)
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come on now (Score:1)
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Details page: http://www.microsoft.com/windowsmobile/microsoftprograms/iemobile.mspx [microsoft.com].
It's ultra basic. No popup support, no Flash, no
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Yes you can... if you have the pocketpc emulator that comes with visual studio.
Already using Mozilla Browser on my N800 (Score:5, Interesting)
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what is the best broswer at the moment? (Score:2)
Any recommendations on what the best browser avail right now is?
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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 (Score:5, Funny)
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Odd item in Related Links (Score:4, Funny)
"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."
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A new name? (Score:3, Funny)
MObile FirefOx
Then, we can abbreviate that to Mofo.
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Re:A new name? (Score:5, Funny)
Minimo...was a disaster! (Score:2)
*shudders*
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Peer into the future (Score:2, Funny)
First slashdot post:
"Liar Liar pants on..."
"Was he running FireFox?"
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Is this because of the iPhone's Safari? (Score:3, Interesting)
Let the browsers wars start again.
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Let the browsers wars start again.
True for Safari proper, but don't forget that Webkit has been ported to Symbian [nokia.com]
the best comment (Score:1)
We've gone from almost no advanced mobile browsers just a few years ago, to a ton of choices. It makes you wonder if Mozilla could do something else to enhance the mobile web, rather than re-creating the wheel with yet another browser that works on the phone.
With that being said, the article also says "Mobile Firefox will arrive later (certainly not before 2008)." That's a lot of time for them to
Hope there will be a Firebug-like dev tool (Score:2)
Ever looked at /. on a WinCE mobile? (Score:2)
one
word
per
line
For whatever reason, the comments render correctly on it. To think I got this phone because it *has* wifi. Arg
Pennywise (Score:2)
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While buying a new browser would fix the surfing issues, the 'smart phone' is just as deficient in other areas - email, phone, alarm, etc. It would be good money after bad. I'm done with it. Going back to a Blackberry is an easy decision for someone who is on the road as much as I am. I talked about the other issues here [multiply.com].
Opera Mini (Score:2)
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Reduced memory footprint?? (Score:5, Funny)
They have tries before (Score:2)
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.
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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 (Score:2)
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Webkit (Score:2, Insightful)
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Do you have a reference for this in the context of GNOME? Were there patches being rejected with NIH reasons? Were decisions being made to not use GNOME-provided facilities and roll one's own instead? Just curious.
I do seem to recall Mozilla doing things like switching to the GTK-native filepicker once it got its non-ASCII-text act together, even though it was still functionally inferior to the XUL filepicker that had been used before that (for example it was m
Bah (Score:2)
Great (Score:2)
minimo on linux (Score:2)
Good for them (Score:2)
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The more, the merrier (Score:4, Interesting)
A mobile web with Opera, Firefox and Safari? It'll be a lot harder to justify picking one and locking out the rest.
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Not for me. The trial version expired the day after I installed it, and I've never been able to get it to work again. I did not change the clock on my phone.
If that's how well the trial works, I'm not that eager to plunk down $24 for the real thing.
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Not this one (Score:2)
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Well, if that is true, and you are the only one with the problems, then you must have a bunch of slashdot accounts and somehow end up on my computer to cause the same issues there. I generally read at -1 so i see a lot of
Trolls explained (Score:2)
If not one person out of over 100 million users can demonstrate how to reproduce these problems, are they really so widespread that they need immediate attention? Or are the people posting about these problems simply trolls for making the problems seem w
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Are you sure it is 1 out of 100 million users? Last I heard that is more then the FF usages world wide if you consider all the post from different people make here claiming to have problems. SO I guess the first step is to acknowledge the problem is more real then not. Also, I sho
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At least this is the exact type of comment I was talking about. Did you notice you did not point out a single bug in Firefox? Try doing that instead of pointlessly rambling on. You generally need to be able to reproduce a bug in order to file a bug report. Maybe you are not able to reproduce it, but at least someone, somewhere, must be lucky enough to stumble upon steps to reproduce these allegedly widespread and serious bugs in Firefox, if they do exist. Right?
I'm not saying that I personally do not expe
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Maybe bug is the wrong word? Maybe serious flaw should be used i
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Yes, you are correct up to a point. If it is a crash in Firefox, yes the Firefox team can fix it. If it is a crash in a driver or a plugin or it is caused by bad hardware, they cannot. It sounds like it is not a bug in Firefox you are experiencing if Firefox crashes a lot on you and the developers do not seem to be addressing your problem.
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Or they don't know what is causing it and cannot fix it. I'm sort of suspecting it might be the spell checker but cannot show that to be the case. When I look at the fundamental differences between 1.5 and 2.0 on the same hardware with no extensions or the same plugins like Flash and java, the only thing different from a user's perspective is the spell
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You can speculate until you're blue in the face, which is pointless, or you can simply give a Talkback ID and have someone look up the stack signature. Only a troll would continue to complain about problems instead of doing something productive about them. How to get the Talkback ID is explained in the relevant link in my first post. This is my common experience
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And yes, I missed the part on the talk back ID thing. I followed your advice and looked for the mozillazine articles on crashing and I'm pretty sure none of them apply to me. OF course then
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