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Mozilla Is Eyeing Your Phone
Posted by
timothy
on Fri Sep 19, 2008 03:49 AM
from the convergence-cometh dept.
from the convergence-cometh dept.
Slatterz writes "Mozilla is planning to develop a browser for mobile phones by 2010. Mitchell Baker, chairman of the Mozilla Foundation, has been laying out her plans for the organisation over the next two years. Baker also committed to expanding the role of Firefox and building on its market share, while developing new browser technology such as the Aurora project. Mozilla has already stated that it is working on a mobile version of Firefox, but has never set a timeframe for release."
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Submission: Mozilla is eyeing your phone by Anonymous Coward
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2010? (Score:5, Insightful)
Apple's safari is already an amazing browser for mobile phones.
I'm sure that Google won't take as long as 2010 to come out with a mobile version of Chrome.
Opera might not be the best browser for mobile phones, but it's pretty decent.
IMHO I think Mozilla needs to get their mobile browser out a little bit earlier than that. Of course it's a good strategy to not release the software until it's ready, but how far behind are they ready to get?
Re:2010? (Score:5, Insightful)
Apple's Safari only comes with the iPod touch and the iPhone and cannot be used with normal phones.
Google Chrome for phones will take far longer to come as they still have to iron out bugs in their desktop version, which is their main focus, before they will release a mobile version.
Opera is not very customizable and I for one hate the interface.
I believe this is a good step by Mozilla and I would far rather have a good version and wait a bit longer than have a buggy version but have it earlier. Anyways, I'm sure they will have beta versions released far earlier than that for early adopters such as you.
Parent
Re:2010? (Score:5, Insightful)
Safari only comes with iPhones, but WebKit is running on Linux (GTK and Qt), Series-60 (Symbian) and even Wince devices. It's pretty hard to find a device that can't run some form of WebKit browser these days, and all of them benefit from the work that other WebKit contributors (Apple, Nokia, Adobe, Google, etc). Mozilla is now saying that WebKit will have two years with no competition in the fastest-growing segment of the market.
This is exactly the reason why Mozilla lost the first browser war. After Netscape 4 (which wasn't a great product), development was handed over to the Mozilla group. Between Netscape 4.8 (1998) and Mozilla 1.0 (2002) there was a four year gap. By the end of this time, the only people using Netscape / Mozilla were the people with no other options - even a lot of Linux / BSD users had gone to Opera - and it's taken them six years to claw back a 15% share in a market where they used to be ubiquitous. In 2010, every mobile device will come with a web browser (most do already), be it Opera, Pocket IE, or something WebKit based. Mozilla will need to give people a really compelling reason to move to their new browser.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
That'll be sync with their desktop Mozilla browser.
you mean like Opera already does? WOW! what will they think of next?
Easy to find a DS or PSP (Score:2)
It's pretty hard to find a device that can't run some form of WebKit browser these days
Nintendo DS can run community apps with the Games n' Music card by Datel, but it also has only 4 MB of RAM, or 12 MB if you plug the extra stick of RAM that comes with Opera into the GBA slot. Sony's PSP has 32 MB of RAM, but you need to already have a modded PSP in order to mod yours to run community apps.
Re:2010? (Score:4, Insightful)
It seems to me that a mobile version of Chrome would end up almost easier than the desktop version. Since you can only view one page (or tab, if you will) at a time on a mobile browser, the whole threading issue that actually makes Chrome fairly unique pretty much goes away. Of course there's also the new Javascript engine which will end up being fairly critical on mobile phones, especially as phones and what we expect to do with them advances.
I always like to see more options available for people, but I don't really see a whole lot of difference on the user's side of things between different mobile browsers provided they all render HTML and CSS the same way (as Gecko and Webkit finally do). It really just comes down to whose affiliate link gets stuck in the google search URL. Aside from just slow rendering in general (which is mostly a hardware limitation), my only real complaint about Safari on the iPhone is a lack of an adblocker, and that's only for the bandwidth savings (if nothing else, it would be nice if it could delay the requests for content that match the filterset.g list until all of the content from the original domain is downloaded just to speed up progressive rendering of the actual content).
Unlike on my desktop, I really don't care tremendously which browser I'm using on a mobile device, unless one is significantly faster than the other. The UI will mostly be device/OS-dependent, and most extensions and/or plugins are pretty much impossible at least logistically (adblock again really being the only thing that you could implement and would make sense to do). If Mozilla produces a mobile browser then more power to them, but they have to provide a benefit over what's already in place in order to get people to switch and quite frankly I don't see it happening on a handset. I live and die by my Firefox extensions on the desktop, but... we'll see, I guess.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Mozilla's Minimo [mozilla.org] running on my Windows Mobile-based phone already runs with tabbed browsing... Just because we're used to ridiculously high-resolution screens doesn't mean we should forget that early computer screens had lower resolutions than many current phone screens...
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Since you can only view one page (or tab, if you will) at a time on a mobile browser
You can use three tabs on the PSP's browser.
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Regarding multiple windows/tabs... on iPhone you get multiple tabs er windows... there's a little button at the bottom to open or navigate to a different window (with different url)... quite handy.
Re:2010? (Score:5, Interesting)
Google Chromes V8 engine can compile to x86 and ARM targets. ARM is in the majority of phones. I don't think it'll take Google very long to get Chrome "good enough". Infact, I'm pretty sure they'll release Android with Chrome on the HTC "Dream", to be released in Q4.
Parent
Re:2010? (Score:5, Informative)
Apple's Safari only comes with the iPod touch and the iPhone and cannot be used with normal phones. Yes, that's right, that's why Nokia's phones all use it. Wait, no, that's not right.
You're right, it isn't. The Nokia phones most certainly do not use safari even though nokias browser does utilize webkit, the same rendering engine as safari and chrome. Webkit != safari.
Parent
Re:2010? (Score:5, Informative)
Actually, they already have been working on a mobile version [mozilla.org] for years. Not much progress though...
Parent
Re:2010? (Score:4, Insightful)
I can endure it for a quick email or weather report, but otherwise I'll just wait a little while until I get an opportunity to use a proper computer.
Parent
Re:2010? (Score:5, Interesting)
What's more, 2010 means another iteration of Moore's Law.
Which means, taking the iPhone as a benchmark, we'll have phones with 256 megs of RAM and 1.2 ghz processors.
It's been awhile since I've touched anything with less than 512 megs on it, but I know I used to run Firefox (before it was called Firefox -- remember Phoenix?) on that little RAM, with plenty of other programs open. Most phones are designed to run exactly one app at once.
So, extrapolating all of that -- I'd say they could do absolutely no coding, other than developing a skin and ensuring that it compiles for ARM, and still have a usable product.
But maybe that's your point -- by the time they get their act together, it should be possible to simply put Linux on an iPhone and run the desktop version of Firefox.
Parent
Re: (Score:2)
There's a fair amount of UI work involved in running well on a small screen like that, though.
Re: (Score:2)
I have run Mozilla (suite) with as little as 32 MB of RAM for at least a year. Apart from taking a bit longer to start up, it worked fine. Also notice how the recommended minimum amount of RAM is 64 MB.
Re:2010? (Score:4, Informative)
There are versions out already. The browser in my Nokia N800 is Mozilla based.
Parent
The Mozilla-based browser in the N800 is great! (Score:3)
The N800 also runs Opera, which is slightly faster than the Mozilla browser, but Mozilla is running all the JavaScript that Opera is discarding. The Mozilla browser supports Flash 9 too. All in all it's a nice piece of work.
The N800 is 800x480 pixels on a 4.1 inch screen, which is just enough to browse "real" websites in the way they were designed to be browsed. With some phones now approaching this (e.g. the HTC Touch HD is 800x480
Re: (Score:2)
but how far behind are they ready to get?
Far enough behind to see what features people take a liking to on other browsers so they know what to steal, err I mean implement ?
"MiniMo" any one ? (Score:2)
"2010" ? Why the hell "2010" ?!?
There's already MinoMo which is *already running* currently on my Openmoko. Also running on Windows CE and Linux PDAs.
There was even a recent announcement on /. [slashdot.org] about a soon-to-be-released "Firefox"-branded mobile browser descendant of that previous effort.
Now what is this 2010 time frame ? Maybe by then they will announce a separate brand of software specially targeting mobile platforms (FireColibri, FireFennec, SeaShrimp or something along these lines with Debian simultaneo
Re: (Score:2)
Actually Google has had a webkit-based mobile browser for Android since an SDK Release last year.
http://googlesystem.blogspot.com/2007/11/web-as-seen-through-googles-mobile.html [blogspot.com]
Google's had a browser for mobile for quite a while. I seriously doubt it ever sees daylight on PocketPC/Symbian.
So is Mozilla aiming to simply beat pocket IE. Not sure about any immediately upcoming version of pocketIE, but unless it is webkit based, I wager it stinks. The current pocket IE (WM6) is just horrible and the reason for
Well I don't know... (Score:4, Insightful)
So I guess beyond 2010, they should just port the desktop code to whatever platform mobile devices run on.
That is unless we don't try to dream and reinvent the simple web browsing so that it would take all your PC's resources and ask for your firstborn.
Re:Well I don't know... (Score:5, Insightful)
Could we drop this already? Any computer is going to be unhappy when you give it a brand-new OS for its sixth birthday (unless the OS is a command-line version of Linux). Vista has its share of problems and then some, but performance has never once been one of them in my experience.
Then again, I don't buy off the shelf PCs bundled with all sorts of sluggish crapware. I buy overpriced PCs bundled with shiny, snobbish crapware! Yes, I'm a Mac user, and while MS couldn't pay me to switch back, I'm still defending Vista (is that the smell of burnt karma in the morning?)
Parent
Re: (Score:2)
That's where Mac is killing Windows. Mac is doing Microsofts business model in an honest way.
Re: (Score:2)
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I buy overpriced PCs bundled with shiny, snobbish crapware! Yes, I'm a Mac user, and while MS couldn't pay me to switch back, I'm still defending Vista (is that the smell of burnt karma in the morning?)
Where is my +1 Bizarre mod when I need it?
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Nope.
The current version of Vista on new hardware is still causing performance issues. At least with our customer base.
And no you can actually put any version current version of Linux on even a P4 with intel graphics and have it work really well. My wife is running an old single core AMD system and Ubuntu runs just fine on it.
I would also say that I would bet that if you put Vista and OS/X on an older Mac Mini that OS/X would be more usable then Vista.
I don't think Vista sucks as bad as lot of people do but
Mozilla Aurora project (Score:4, Interesting)
Glad to hear that they are developing the Aurora project. Very interesting piece of software, you can find the home page at http://www.adaptivepath.com/aurora/ [adaptivepath.com]
Again? (Score:5, Interesting)
How many projects to get Mozilla on mobiles have they started so far? Whatever happened to MiniMo?
I suspect this'll happen when mobiles have enough memory to just run Firefox.
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Yep. In my experience it's memory that's key - FF3 will run quite snappily on a Pentium II if it's got >=512MB of memory.
Re: (Score:2)
A port of Firefox 2 is available for newer ARM based computers running RISC OS.
One of these RISC OS computers uses a 400MHz Samsung ARM processor with 128Mb of RAM as standard. I think it's fair to say processor power and RAM aren't going to be too big an issue.
Oh, you mean in North America? (Score:5, Interesting)
Minimo (Score:2, Interesting)
The summary is misleading, it should say "Mozilla is planning to develop a[n another] browser for mobile phones by 2010.", because Minimo (Mini Mozilla) has existed for years: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minimo [wikipedia.org]
I've even used it on my PPC, but found that it isn't very good, especially compared to Opera Mobile.
SCNR (Score:4, Funny)
If Mozilla is eyeing for the phone - doesn't that make it an eyePhone?
*TA-DUM* *CHRASH* *THUD*
Thank you, thank you, I'm here all week. Try the fish.
Not so far (Score:2, Informative)
The new mozilla based mobile, based on current mozilla techno + some additions for mobile, is already available in alpha.
https://wiki.mozilla.org/Fennec [mozilla.org]
This is like Firefox with the ui completely redone.
It will also support extensions.
2010 is just 1.5 year away so having a non beta build for 2010 doesn't seem unrealistic.
I guess some optimisations made for mobile environnement will benefit everybody (like the optimization done for Firefox)
(and there's already a tracemonkey javascript for arm so this will be
AwesomeBar? (Score:2)
Will it feature the "AwesomeBar"?
Not interested.
Has anyone else noticed? (Score:3, Interesting)
Has anyone else noticed that every six months Mozilla announces that they're working on a mobile browser?
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
I will never NEVER get tired of that meme.
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
The desktop versions of mainstream browsers nowadays have memory consumption in roughly the same order of magnitude.
Also consider that browsing on a as-smart-as-it-can-be device will still be lighter than browsing on a full blown computer.
You don't even need tabs to get that piece of information you need off the net, log out and move along.
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Re:Who'd ever use this... (Score:4, Insightful)
Parent
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Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
How on earth would caching images on an online server save me money? If it very aggressively cached content on the device itself, maybe...
If you meant compressed, that would be a different story entirely. However, I don't think it likely that too many people without an unlimited data plan would be doing much if any browsing on their phones. Still, the bandwidth savings would be a big plus. If I could cut down on the bandwidth usage significantly at the expense of some jpeg artifacting, I'd be all over i
Re: (Score:2)
I think the trick was downsampling the images to reduce load times, (with a corresponding saving in data consumption as well)...
And plenty of people without unlimited data plans surf on their phone.
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I virtually always get over 0.5Mbps from my HSDPA connection, and frequently saturate the 2.1Mbps Bluetooth 2.0 link to my phone, which is more than adequate for browsing without compression. 3G/3.5G networks are rapidly expanding around the world. Proxies were a great idea back in the days of GPRS, but I just don't think it's worth pissing about with them
Re: (Score:2)
I agree, though the great thing about Opera Mini is that it's written in Java, meaning that just about any cheap old phone can run it. Whilst most phones these days have built-in browsers, they're often not very good, but Opera Mini means they have a decent web browser. (I'm always amused when I see Iphone-fans say how wonderful it is they can now view "proper web pages", mistakenly thinking that all that was possible before the Iphone was WAP pages...)