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.'"

By the time....

I'll bet that at the sluggish rate Gecko development proceeds, by the time the mobile version appears, mobile devices will have almost the power of today's stationary hardware.

Re:

I'll bet that at the sluggish rate Gecko development proceeds, by the time the mobile version appears, mobile devices will have almost the power of today's stationary hardware.

Wow! Someone who actually read the article!

Re:By the time....

FTFA:

Getting a no-compromise web experience on devices requires significant memory (>=64MB) as well as significant CPU horsepower. High end devices today are just approaching these requirements and will be commonplace soon For example, the iPhone has 128MB of DRAM and somewhere between a 400 to 600 MHz processor. It is somewhere between 10x-100x slower on scripting benchmarks than a new MacBook Pro and somewhere between 3-5x slower than an old T40 laptop on the same wifi network. But rapid improvements in mobile processors will close this gap within a few years.

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.

it's a pattern of behaviour

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 thing I like about Firefox, is it's something people can really embrace, and extend.

reduced footprint?

I wish they would carry those lessons over to firefox sometime soon.

Re:reduced footprint?

Damn, you guys beat me to it.

I suppose it's obvious, though...

mjmac@ganymede:~$ ps axwu | grep firefox
mjmac 13089 0.9 11.3 786244 232776 ? Sl Oct09 16:47 /usr/lib/firefox/firefox-bin

Isn't firefox supposed to be the lightweight alternative to Mozilla? *cough*

What is with the Mozilla naming conventions?

Is it really necessary to consult a chart to make sense of their products?

"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?

"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?

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.

Reduced footprint

Perhapses that knowledge could allow them to reduce the footprint of the full sized version, maybe? Hopefully?

Re:

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:Reduced footprint

It's not a bug, he was just spell checking using the Gollum dictionary. The English ones don't include "perhapses".

My Precccccciooooouuuuuuusssss?

Wonder if it's the same as MicroB on the N800...

I've been running MicroB on the Nokia N800 and it now handles pretty much any ajax site I throw at it. I had problems with many ajax sites using Opera 9, not to mention Minimo, but MicroB handles them nicely. Not many extensions available yet though.

Already using Mozilla Browser on my N800

Check out MicroB [maemo.org], a mozilla-based browser for the Maemo platform on the N800. I prefer it to the default Opera-based browser that the N800 ships with. It's based on Gecko 1.9.

Google Phone

This isn't surprising considering Google's recent purchase of Mozilla, and the search giant's new focus on mobile with their Google Phone.

Odd item in Related Links

Anyone else think that "Compare prices on Mozilla" is an odd choice to appear in the list of Related Links?

"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."

A new name?

I suggest they call it:

MObile FirefOx

Then, we can abbreviate that to Mofo.

Re:

The Mozilla Foundation is already sometimes called MoFo, and it requires a much less retarded interpretation.

Re:A new name?

I prefer FoxBile.

Is this because of the iPhone's Safari?

I've used mobile versions of Opera, InternetExplorer, Minimo, and now Safari (and a few other off-brand browsers). Up until Safari, I found Opera to be the best for mobile browsing, but even it was lacking. The iPhone's Safari seems pretty good so far, still not perfect, but better then the rest. But with Safari, you're limited to using it only on the iPhone (or iPod touch). Hopefully this new development from Mozilla will offer a nice high quality mobile browser that is compatible with multiple devices. I'm looking forward to a browser war for the mobile market, its about time we got a choice of good quality browsers instead of being stuck with low grade versions that can't even render simple pages well.

Let the browsers wars start again.

Re:

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]

Reduced memory footprint??

Firefox on mobile devices? Great, but where do I get 2GB of ram for my treo?

Re:

It's quite possible to have different people working on different things at the same time. Funky how there's been updates to fx2 while fx3 was in development, isn't it? I agree fx still needs a good bit of work, and awesomely enough it's getting it irrel

Re:Why have 23 flavors when you can't do vanilla?

I use Firefox all day, every day sometimes with 20 tabs open. I won't say it never crashes but it manages to last a hell of a lot longer than 3 hours on average. I don't have issues with the memory either considering the number of tabs, session history, cache and so on.

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.

The more, the merrier

The more fully-capable mobile browsers are out there, the less we need to worry about a return to the bad old days when people designed one version of a site for Netscape and another version for Internet Explorer, then let one version bitrot. We've already seen the first rumblings of iPhone-only sites [meyerweb.com].

A mobile web with Opera, Firefox and Safari? It'll be a lot harder to justify picking one and locking out the rest.