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Mozilla The Internet Handhelds Hardware

Mozilla's Mini-Me 258

Posted by michael from the no-sharks-no-lasers dept.
An anonymous contributor writes "LinuxDevices has a story by the leaders of the 'Minimo' (Mini Mozilla) project, an effort to reduce Mozilla's code and runtime footprints and optimize its display for the small screens on embedded devices. The Minimo authors believe Minimo will become the browser of choice on embedded Linux devices with 64MB of RAM."
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Mozilla's Mini-Me More

Mozilla's Mini-Me

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  • There's nothing I hate more than having to scroll sideways on a website.

  • Looks familiar? (Score:4, Funny)

    by Goalie_Ca ( 584234 ) on Friday May 21, 2004 @01:32PM (#9217736)
    I don't suppose they call this a mini-dupe? It is a clone after all!

  • PocketPC (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Merovign ( 557032 ) on Friday May 21, 2004 @01:32PM (#9217751)
    It's not just Zaurus, it would be really, REALLY nice to have a browser alternative for handhelds that doesn't require switching OSs (frequently a mess since there are so many differences, both ROM and hardware) or abandoning all your software and trying to find handheld-capable Linux alternatives.

    It Would Be Nice, Wouldn't It?

    • Re:PocketPC (Score:5, Informative)

      by InodoroPereyra ( 514794 ) on Friday May 21, 2004 @01:49PM (#9217994)
      Well, from the project page [mozilla.org]:
      The primary focus of Minimo to date has been system with ~32-64 MB of RAM, running Linux and using the GTK toolkit. We have been investigating other platforms and toolkits.
      In other words, initially it is not intended to be cross-platform, but it might happen in future.

      • Worldgate and Mozilla/minimo (Score:4, Informative)

        by jesup ( 8690 ) * <(randellslashdot) (at) (jesup.org)> on Friday May 21, 2004 @05:21PM (#9220413) Homepage
        While minimo targets Linux; it inherently is largely applicable to another environment - especially since they expect the front-end to be rewritten by someone using it in a real application.

        Worldgate was going to use Mozilla for it's next-generation browse-the-web-on-your-cable-box application, where the browsers all run in servers at the headend and send screen images down to the settops as MPEG stills. We ran over 20 copies of Mozilla (tuned in ways similar to minimo) on 500Mhz P3's with 512MB of memory, and performance was reasonable. We lived with scroll bars where we had to (we subverted a few things to let pages fit tighter, but we also had to use larger-than-normal fonts). For added fun we had no mouse, but we had keyboards.

        The toughest part was "geometric navigation" of links/etc with arrow keys; before development on that ended when we sold off our patents/business we'd mostly gotten that working, but there are more edge cases than you can count (nested and inline frames, imagemaps, etc).

    • Re:PocketPC (Score:2, Interesting)

      by Milo of Kroton ( 780850 )
      Why use it for just PocketPC? I'd like to have a "minimum resources" browser, as long as it can offer most of the features of Firefox. Certainly pop-up blocking and ask before accepting cookies is a must.

      • I agree (Score:3, Informative)

        by zogger ( 617870 )
        there are just untold millions of computers out there still on the net, running minimal RAM. I've tried a bunch of them, sad to say older versions of explorer seem to require the least amount, of any of the well known browsers I've tried. My latest was on a toshiba satellite laptop, only 16 megs of ram, tried moz, firefox, opera, and it had explorer 5, 5 worked the best. I'd like an alternative, moz functionality (more or less), with minimum resources. I'll be giving this thing a tryout.

        On my old macs, iCa

    • Re:PocketPC (Score:3, Informative)

      by Kenja ( 541830 )
      You mean like Thunderhawk or Netfront? There are several browsers for PocketPC out there. You just need to look.

  • Wow, only 64 MB of RAM? (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward on Friday May 21, 2004 @01:33PM (#9217753)
    So now it only requires 64 MB of RAM to format text and pictures, eh? I ran my first web browser on a computer with 32 MB of RAM. And what about Dillo [dillo.org], which has only 400k of source code?

    • Re:Wow, only 64 MB of RAM? (Score:5, Insightful)

      by Pxtl ( 151020 ) on Friday May 21, 2004 @01:37PM (#9217827) Homepage
      Good god yes. Sometimes I think back and wonder where the hell all the software went. I browsed the internet with Windows 3.1, trumpet Winsock, and Netscape on my 486 DX/66 that had a screaming 16 megs of ram.

      Whenever you look at an old fossil of a computer, remember this: at some point, that was considered so much power that we would never be able to find a use for it all. We can't even blame MS - Linux gear is just as bloated.

      • Re:Wow, only 64 MB of RAM? (Score:4, Funny)

        by geomon ( 78680 ) on Friday May 21, 2004 @01:46PM (#9217957) Homepage Journal
        Whenever you look at an old fossil of a computer, remember this: at some point, that was considered so much power that we would never be able to find a use for it all. We can't even blame MS - Linux gear is just as bloated.

        You could always just run Minix [cs.vu.nl].

      • One thing I've noticed is that I've stopped thinking "Wow, this is so much speed/space/power, that I'll never need more than this!" Like when I see huge new hard drives, I now think "400 GB is a lot of space, but I'll still fill it up with legally acquired movies eventually."

        I still like to upgrade to newer and faster stuff, but it just doesn't seem as amazing as the first time I got a 500 MB hard drive and could fit an entire encyclopedia into a little metal box.

      • Re:Wow, only 64 MB of RAM? (Score:4, Interesting)

        by pebs ( 654334 ) on Friday May 21, 2004 @02:03PM (#9218164) Homepage
        Good god yes. Sometimes I think back and wonder where the hell all the software went. I browsed the internet with Windows 3.1, trumpet Winsock, and Netscape on my 486 DX/66 that had a screaming 16 megs of ram.

        Yep.. I did the same on a 486/33 w/ 8 MB of RAM :)

        We can't even blame MS - Linux gear is just as bloated.

        There is still plenty of Linux software that isn't bloated. The thing I like about Linux is you can get by using only CLI / text-based software if you want to, and its reasonable to do so for many tasks. For Windows, you have to load up a heavyweight GUI to do anything.
        • yeah no kidding.

          I use to run a two node BBS in the background on 486 DX/2 66 with 16 megs of ram, and access the internet or write papers, all with good old OS/2. Windows 3.1 with 16 megs of ram, such a waste. ;)

          Now, I STILL can't archive shit using pkzip or whatever in the background without my machine slowing down noticably.
        • The thing I like about Linux is you can get by using only CLI / text-based software if you want to

          I was using OS/2 Warp on a 100MHz Pentium with 16MB RAM. Not command line, but full GUI. And it was responsive and quick. And OS/2's GUI was much more heavyweight than Window 95's...

      • I browsed the internet with Windows 3.1, trumpet Winsock, and Netscape on my 486 DX/66 that had a screaming 16 megs of ram.

        So what, I have the capability to browse the Internet with my Commodore 64, RR-Net adaptor, and Contiki OS. However, it's a definate case of, "It's not the quality of his speech, it's the fact the dog speaks at all". Sure, you can access the Internet on a 286/386/C64 but you're probably not going to have niceties like Flash, CSS, Javascript, graphics, etc..

        • Oh, I know - we all go back to the days of the 1200 modem on the C64. I was just describing my first internet computer. I think you do mention the largest problem - Flash. All the other non-w3c webcrap you can live without - except Flash and Javascript, as a very large number of websites depend on those things to run.

          Any modern ultralight browser will have to support those, and it won't be easy at all. I remember flash on my p166, and it wasn't pleasant. IMHO, people are right, Mozilla is such an extr
      • "Trumpet Winsock" - Now that's a set of words I haven't heard for years.

        It reminds me of the discussion that I had with some guy in #linux on irc.freenode.net that went by the name of ZMobyTurbo. I can remember getting the fastest speeds of anyone on the BBS systems with my Zoom 28.8 modem at the tail-end of the BBS era, as Wildcat 5 started introducing graphical browsing and web capabilities. My favorite terminal program of those days was "TELIX". There is a great Unix clone of TELIX called "Minicom",
        • My 486DX2 66 had 24 MB of RAM. It was bleeding edge! It was nice to not have to hack on the autoexec.bat and config.sys to free up more memory to get DOOM to run. ;)

          Now I may be wildly wrong here, but wasn't the original DOOM a DOS app, and wouldn't going to a DOS prompt from Windows (3.1) or just not loading Windows mean you were back at the 640k limit (less command.com and whatever was loaded from config.sys and autoexec.bat) and everything else was enhanced/extended memory? Was Win95 different?
        • Ah yes. I remember playing DOOM 2 on my 486sx 25 with 4(!) MB RAM. I had to reboot and hold down shift to save as much memory as possible, and it still choked itself on level 30 :-)
    • 64 MB ought to be enough for anybody.

    • Re:Wow, only 64 MB of RAM? (Score:5, Insightful)

      by alecf ( 2079 ) on Friday May 21, 2004 @02:14PM (#9218319) Homepage
      I'm not about to say that Mozilla isn't a resource hog.

      However, lets at least take things into perspective. When you browsed the web with 32MB of RAM (hey, so did I) it was with "HTML 1.0" and small images.. remember back when web pages had mostly text, grey backgrounds, and a few pictures here and there?

      These days we have:
      - JavaScript - a full fledged interpreted language
      - the DOM - complete read/write live access to the current document's structure
      - CSS, which involves applying complex matching of style to document fragments and formatting of those fragments,
      - new layout concepts like absolute and relative positining, floats, etc
      - vastly more complex layout due to interactions of HTML rules and CSS rules
      - plugins
      - XML
      - support for JPEG, PNG, animated GIFs
      - HTTP 1.1 with reusable connections, pipelining, compression, smarter but more complex caching, and more

      And thats the short list. And as much as you might say "that's just fluff! That's not the core of the web" you'd sure be complaining if your web browser didn't support all that.

      The web is a lot more complex than it once was. You can't harken back to the days of Mosaic without realizing all the technologies that go into a modern web browser.
      • I ran Internet Explorer 6 on a system with 64MB of memory and Windows 98 for years. I know that it wasn't being swapped out because I disabled swap (Windows 98 is horrible at memory management).

        It supports the vast majority of those technologies.

        KHTML also seems to run well. I had it running on my 32MB iPaq at one point.

    • Re:Wow, only 64 MB of RAM? (Score:5, Funny)

      by fikx ( 704101 ) on Friday May 21, 2004 @02:17PM (#9218347) Journal
      Of course....the internet has more stuff now. It used to fit in 400K, but now it's so big, you need at least 64M to hold it all...

      And all the viruses make it worse...I don't know how many times I've had to re-install the internet on my PC...

  • Not to be pessimistic... (Score:4, Interesting)

    by Kiriwas ( 627289 ) on Friday May 21, 2004 @01:33PM (#9217754) Homepage
    ... but will this browser be able to do anything that my current Opera install cannot? I use Mozilla on my desktop and its great, but it has always seemed a bit bloated. Far too much to be able to do something with it for the handhelds. But then again, I may be wrong. We shall see.

  • Contrast with Mosaic circa 1994 (Score:5, Interesting)

    by shoppa ( 464619 ) on Friday May 21, 2004 @01:33PM (#9217758)
    The first graphical browser I ever ran - Mosaic on a VAX circa 1994 - was on a 16 Mbyte machine that supported a few dozen users at a time.

    Of course we thought it was an enormous resource hog back then too :-). And I didn't see how the web could possibly replace gopher!

    • Re:Contrast with Mosaic circa 1994 (Score:5, Insightful)

      by hak1du ( 761835 ) on Friday May 21, 2004 @02:34PM (#9218586) Journal
      HTML4, JavaScript, plug-ins, anti-aliasing, DOM, internationalization, dealing with incorrect HTML and backwards compatibility all make Mozilla as big as it is.

      Furthermore, you can get quick release cycles or careful coding, but not both. Most desktop software (Windows, OS X, Gnome, KDE, etc.) is developed and optimized only as much as is needed to make it run on current hardware.

      When looking at Mozilla's memory footprint, also keep in mind that most people run it with significant in-memory caching.

    • Re:Contrast with Mosaic circa 1994 (Score:4, Insightful)

      by timeOday ( 582209 ) on Friday May 21, 2004 @03:09PM (#9218984)
      These comparisons of browsers today vs. yesteryear mean nothing, when the Web of today is totally different than it used to be. You can't even make sense of the web with mosaic any more.

      Determine the pounds of documentation necessary to specify the set of "web standards" required to comfortably view the Web, now vs. 10 years ago. That includes Javascript, CSS, DHTML, if not flash and Java itself. HTML itself is a mere drop in the bucket!

      And with the proliferation of broadband, pages are getting more and more content rich (aka bloated). Sure there were "inline images" back then, but if you were to plot the average number of images per page (or flash apps, or HTTP requests per page, etc) over the past several years, what would you find?

      Are programmers really producing bloated and wasteful code? I'd argue the Web itself is more to blame.

  • A T-Rex's footprint? (Score:3, Funny)

    by Lispy ( 136512 ) on Friday May 21, 2004 @01:34PM (#9217765) Homepage
    Hard too believe it's going to be small enough. ;-)

  • Brilliant Idea (Score:5, Funny)

    by CrosseyedPainless ( 27978 ) on Friday May 21, 2004 @01:34PM (#9217773) Homepage
    Hey! Let's just crosspost everything [osnews.com] from OSNews, and like, not even change the titles much. Oh, wait!!! It's been done! Nevermind.
  • Heck... these whipper-snappers today all want their fancy-schmancy pictures and animated graphics. In my day we used LYNX and LIKED IT!!!

    But seriously... why doesn't someone start low-graphic mini-browsers. They could use LYNX or some other text-based browser. After all, when you're looking at a very limited amount of real-estate on your screen, do you really care about missing out on those stupid "Punch The Monkey" ads?

    Pheh... give me the good old days of BBSes.

    -TheTXLibra
    "You've got no kids, no w

  • Qualify (Score:2, Informative)

    by Bronz ( 429622 )

    Embedded *free* browser of choice maybe. Opera still has a rather large development advantage on small screen devices.

  • Whatever (Score:3, Interesting)

    by paradigim_shft ( 774200 ) on Friday May 21, 2004 @01:34PM (#9217784)
    64 MB of RAM? WTF? Opera 7.5 is 3.5 MB without Java and it includes not only small screen rendering, but a full featured browser, mail client, newreader, rss reader, download manager, and IRC client.

    These Mozilla guys need to smoke less crack and get their act together.

    • Re:Whatever (Score:4, Informative)

      by Timesprout ( 579035 ) on Friday May 21, 2004 @01:39PM (#9217856)
      They are actually saying Minimo requires about 25 MBs of RSS, to me this is still way too high. Another point is that much as I love Firefox, the already stripped down browser, its a memory pig. The longer it runs, the more it uses.

    • Re:Whatever (Score:5, Informative)

      by geomon ( 78680 ) on Friday May 21, 2004 @01:39PM (#9217868) Homepage Journal
      If you read the article, they are talking about rendering a fully compliant webpage. They did mention Opera and PocketIE. Both failed to render at 32MB. From the article:

      "We have run the same tests using Opera and Pocket IE on 32MB device form factors, and neither can make it though the page load test based on their lack of browser content and standards support, or they just simply run out of memory trying to display the pages."

      I don't think they are talking about the size of the binary distribution, but the size of all the components loaded into RAM and rendering compliant webpages.

    • Re:Whatever (Score:5, Informative)

      by An Onerous Coward ( 222037 ) on Friday May 21, 2004 @02:54PM (#9218811) Homepage
      I love to break it to people when they just don't get it.

      Firefox is only about an 8 MB download, and Mozilla is around 12-16. Sure, they're both bigger than Opera, but the size of the executable says nothing about how much memory it will use while running.

      Okay, say you have a program that, when run, calculates the digits of pi. The program itself may be only a few tens of kilobytes, but it may allocate fifty megs or so as a holding area for calculations.

      Or, an even more basic example:

      while( true )
      {
      fork();
      }

      Compile it, and the executable is tiny. Run it, and it will quickly eat every bit of RAM in sight. With the loading of files, creating of data structures, caching of results, etc., it's unusual to find a program that doesn't use significantly more memory than is required to fit the executable alone.

      Please, smoke less crack and get your act together.

  • Wow. (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Dizzle ( 781717 ) on Friday May 21, 2004 @01:34PM (#9217786) Journal
    Mozilla keeps impressing me more and more. Already I use Thunderbird/Firefox exclusively. I wonder what Mozilla has in store for these programs? With Firefox especially being as good as it is now, what does the future have in store?

  • Plans for other devices? (Score:4, Interesting)

    by Gizzmonic ( 412910 ) on Friday May 21, 2004 @01:35PM (#9217788) Homepage Journal
    I would kill for a decent browser on PocketPC(2002). I know it's a Microsoft platform, and worse yet, it's a total half-baked mess, but I have to use it at work. Pocket Internet Explorer can't even access OWA (outlook web access properly). I know that a real browser could easily fit into 32MB RAM with 400mhz of ARM power, I just don't see Microsoft providing that.

    Mozilla, VLC, and a decent MP3 player would make the PocketPC almost bareable.
    • Hey, OWA doesn't even work with IE6. We install Firefox on our OWA-Users systems so that they are finally able to download attachements from the OWA-Server. So much for Microsofts interoperability.
    • because PocketPC has PocketIE built in. You will pay for that ROM space whether or not you use it. It is best compared with the problems of separating IE from any other Windows OS, but less doable because of the integration on ROM. If you have a large program such as a browser, you don't really want it taking space in RAM. If you have a pocket-Moz it would be cool but I guess it would be better if you could build your own ROM image so you could lose IE. With a Pocket Linux you can.
    • Indeed, all of the weaknesses of Windows on the desktop (registry nightmares, reboots) but with non of the advantages (GUI behaviour is different, different CPU platforms, fixed screen sizes etc..). I only own one since there's less software for the other platforms.

      I'd love Mozilla for PocketPC. PIE is a bit dumb and basic.

  • Why not make it a main browser? (Score:4, Interesting)

    by www.sorehands.com ( 142825 ) on Friday May 21, 2004 @01:35PM (#9217796) Homepage
    If MiniMoe supports most of the web standards, why not make Minicurley^h^h^h^h^h^hmo the primary browser?

    If the browser works well in a 64MB platform, why won't it run well in a 256MB system?


    I didn't see anything as a downside to using Minimo as opposed to Mozilla.

    • Considering that the whole thing is being wrapped up in a GTK component, it sounds like we can expect Minimo to work on regular desktops as well. The question, then, is whether you're more interested in speed and simplicity or features and flexibility.

      Chances are, most desktop users are going to prefer the latter. But if you're trying to cobble together some older hardware, it might be an option for you. Speaking of which, does anyone know of a distro targeted specifically towards older machines?

  • Already been done. (Score:4, Informative)

    by networkGhettoWhore ( 564183 ) on Friday May 21, 2004 @01:36PM (#9217814)
    The Geronimo Project [sourceforge.net] has been working on this same copncept for about 2 years now. Why reinvent the wheel?

  • why mozilla? (Score:5, Interesting)

    by drmancini ( 712059 ) on Friday May 21, 2004 @01:36PM (#9217820) Homepage
    if they wanted to create a mini-mi package, why didn't they start with the firefox codebase ... my guess is the browser would rock

    • Re:why mozilla? (Score:2, Informative)

      by BillLeeLee ( 629420 )
      A mini-firefox project does make more sense, and I want one in hopes that they don't include that bizarre memory leak "feature" in by default. The one where if you let firefox sit there for a while and you keep opening new pages, firefox's memory usage goes from 20 MB up to 150 MB.

      It's happened to me, but a fix for it was to type about:config and set 'browser.cache.memory.enable' to 'false'

    • Re:why mozilla? (Score:5, Interesting)

      by jsebrech ( 525647 ) on Friday May 21, 2004 @02:32PM (#9218552)
      if they wanted to create a mini-mi package, why didn't they start with the firefox codebase ... my guess is the browser would rock

      Actually, firefox is built around the mozilla engine. It is based on the mozilla trunk, and picks up code changes to the trunk automatically. Mozilla is EXTREMELY modular. Mini-mo takes the kind of approach that was taken to make firefox (strip out stuff you don't need in a browser, simplify the UI, tweak settings for desktop use) to improve performance on PDA's.

      It would not have been a benefit to start from the firefox codebase, since most of the firefox work is UI-related, which is radically different in mini-mo.
  • This does seem like a very good move for Mozilla. Now, it may increase market-share and we could see more websites that demand IE.

    However I suspect people will buy WinCE devices and run IE because they want something as similar to their desktop PCs as possible.

  • For regular desktops? (Score:5, Insightful)

    by AtariAmarok ( 451306 ) on Friday May 21, 2004 @01:37PM (#9217838)
    The "reduce Mozilla's code and runtime footprints" features sound good for the regular desktop Mozilla experience as well. Why not demand tight, efficient outside of the handheld environment?
    • Reducing binary and runtime memory consumption is a great idea, but it's usually going to involve some design tradeoffs. This may mean the product will run slower, or have a slower, less responsive UI.

      Computer storage is cheap. My time is not.

    • Re:For regular desktops? (Score:3, Informative)

      by BZ ( 40346 )
      90% of the changes for Minimo have been made to the core engine used by the desktop Mozilla as well. The remaining changes involve things like ifdef-ing out XUL support. Desktop Mozilla's footprint has benefited quite a bit from this project.
  • While we're at it can someone come up with a way to shrink the Mozilla mascot. I just marvel at the possibilities.

    My Shrink: "Delusional."

    Me: "I swear, its a 5 inch tall dinosaur living in my glovebox!"

    My Shrink: "Sure, Nurse please get this man a tranqil... um.... mint from the special jar."

  • If there were a crossplatform engine to handle ecmascript and xul, that ran on Linux, PocketPC and Palm, this could get really exciting.

  • Qtopia port? (Score:5, Insightful)

    by j0hndoe ( 677869 ) on Friday May 21, 2004 @01:45PM (#9217939) Journal
    The Zaurus, and other embedded Linux distros tend to use Qtopia instead of X. Although X can be installed, it's sort of a power user thing right now, and believe it or not, not all Zaurus owners are Linux experts, and some who are don't want to deal with all the extra bloat that installing X requires. Minimo would gain a lot of users if they made a Qtopia port.

  • My laptop has 64 MB RAM! (Score:3, Interesting)

    by BitwizeGHC ( 145393 ) on Friday May 21, 2004 @01:49PM (#9217986) Homepage
    I know, it's old; it's a 1998-vintage Dell that wears like iron and currently I wouldn't trade it for anything ('cept maybe a new Powerbook).

    Getting a decent web experience on the thing is a pain; even Firefox skirts the edge of usability. Dillo is ok for vieweing software docs but is hit-or-miss on the "real" intarweb.

    Something like Minimo would be nice for those of us who're still a little behind the times, portable-wise.
    • I have fun with Epiphany over here. Give it a shot on your notebook. But then again, mine has 128MB and that is about the least a recent Linux distribution (with Gnome 2.6) requires.

  • mozilla OS (Score:5, Interesting)

    by farkinga ( 113105 ) on Friday May 21, 2004 @01:53PM (#9218034) Homepage
    ...how soon will PDAs boot directly into Mozilla?

    I know, i know... not too soon [mozilla.org]. Nor should Mozilla worry about the hardware side of things... So let's just say you boot linux and "use Mozilla as your shell", whatever that means.

    But imagine the consequences of a beautiful, persistent, PDA platform-independent "netGUI" that was extensible and modular... Sounds like Microsoft may soon perceive its toes to be stepped upon again. The next showdown? Mozilla vs WinCE.

    Is Mozilla becoming a reasonable platform for PDA application development? Sounds like that...

  • According to the Simpsons, it's not possible (Score:5, Funny)

    by Deraj DeZine ( 726641 ) on Friday May 21, 2004 @01:58PM (#9218090)
    Homer: Umm ... I guess I'll take that one.

    Salesman: Well, do you need a paperweight? 'Cause if you buy that machine, that's all you're going to have, an expensive paperweight.

    Homer: Well, a paperweight would be nice, but what I really need is a computer. How about that one? [points to a second machine]

    Salesman: That technology is three months old. Only suckers buy out-of-date machines. You're not a sucker, are you sir?

    Homer: Heavens no!

    Salesman: Oh good, because if you were, I'd have to ask you to leave the store.

    Homer: I just need something to receive email.

    Salesman: [whistles] You'll need a top-of-the-line machine for that. [shows Homer a top-of-the-budget machine] That's the same computer astronauts use to do their taxes.

    Homer: I was an astronaut.

    Salesman: Of course you were.

  • Backporting ? (Score:4, Informative)

    by InodoroPereyra ( 514794 ) on Friday May 21, 2004 @01:58PM (#9218092)
    It would be great if they would be able to not only strip mozilla down in their embedded version, but also backport changes to the main CVS trunk to help mozilla itself reduce its code-sice and memory/resource foot print.

    Think Opera, it is a nice, fast web processor weighting about 5Mb when statically compiled (for Linux). And it also runs embedded. Maybe the folks at Opera managed to capitalize from the parallel development of an embedded and a desktop version of the same browser ... of course, they benefit from using Qt/QtEmbedded too I guess!

    • Re:Backporting ? (Score:3, Informative)

      by BZ ( 40346 )
      > but also backport changes to the main CVS trunk

      They do, as it happens. As you could verify yourself by looking at the CVS logs.

  • Isn't 64M still too big? (Score:5, Insightful)

    by dharma21 ( 537631 ) on Friday May 21, 2004 @02:04PM (#9218179)
    We were using browsers on computers that only had 16M on memory. Perhaps I'm just ignorant of new browser requirements. I understand that the entire device OS and application code would have to reside in the same 64M space, and you won't have a nice disk in which to cache pages for faster viewing, but if you're only going to be caching text and the occasional small image, how much space do you need? What is the smallest footprint in which to use for a browser?
    • We were using browsers on computers that only had 16M on memory.

      I started my online life with a 486 laptop with 8 MB running Windows 3.1. Browsing with IE, Netscape and Opera (the fastest). Even ran a web server, Wsplug [compuserve.com], to server my first homepages.

      This 400 MHz K6 laptop with 160 MB is blazingly fast with Firefox (or whatever it's called this week), almost overkill :)

    • Re:Isn't 64M still too big? (Score:4, Informative)

      by An Onerous Coward ( 222037 ) on Friday May 21, 2004 @03:24PM (#9219145) Homepage
      Just out of curiosity, I fired up Lynx, and it's only using 3KB of memory. So if the only goal is to make a browser that's quick and functional, they're seriously overkilling it.

      But that's not the goal here. Look at all the stuff Lynx isn't doing. I'm not sure it even does tables properly.

      My impression is that the goal is to take a mostly standards-compliant browser and make it suitable for handhelds, without sacrificing that compliance. Consider all the standards that involves, none of which existed in the early browsers you mentioned: CSS, Javascript, XML, DHTML, the list goes on. Further, I'm guessing they'll want to try and keep the user experience as similar as possible, which means keeping things like graphics display, popup blocking, plugins, XUL, etc.

      Also consider the fact that handhelds are surfing the same Moore's Law as desktops. The RAM just keeps on coming. The trend that made this project inconceivable two years ago, and possible today, will make it almost a non-issue a few years down the road.
    • check out http://www.offbyone.com [offbyone.com]

      its 1mb, can run off a disk/network whatever, runs on most all windows. only http 3.2 standards, but thats images+frames, so its nicer than lynx ;p
  • There hasn't been a lot of releases lately; I've been searching and I was wondering if Minimo would be a suitable replacement for Mozilla in 486-pentium boxes...

  • KHTML ? Already used in your Zaurus PDAs ... (Score:4, Insightful)

    by phoxix ( 161744 ) on Friday May 21, 2004 @02:16PM (#9218331)
    KDE's KHTML [konqueror.org] is already being used in devices with little memory and slower CPUs

    Screenshots include Google [openzaurus.org], Slashdot [openzaurus.org], and even The Onion [openzaurus.org].

    Whats more is that the it is a fully featured browser (SSL, screen resizing, etc). And it does not require X to run.

    Sunny Dubey
  • "LinuxDevices has a story by the leaders of the 'Minimo' (Mini Mozilla) project..."

    Heh I'm a little surprised after all the copyright trouble they've had with names that they used this one.

    (Note: Before you hit the reply button, I'm not saying that they are in violation of anything, I'm thinking more about 'knee-jerk danger avoidance'....)

  • Ummm call me an old fart here but I don't think that is exactly a small, or could be considered embedded. Given people have written decent browsers (e.g. Opera, and a few cracking J2ME ones) which run in 10s of K and at make 100 this really isn't anything special or challenging.

    1995 - NCSA Mosaic, IBM PC, 16Mb of RAM.

    I for one am not impressed at a project that considers embedded devices as having to have 64Mb of RAM, that is just a PC with a small screen.

    Move on folks, its only on Slashdot because they

  • I'm not as sad as Dostoyevsky (Score:2, Informative)

    by Anonymous Coward
    OK, so these cmments seem to be misconception city at the moment.

    So, just for clarifcation:

    MiniMo is built from exactly the same codebase as Mozilla / Firefox / Thunderbird. If you want to build MiniMo, you can do so straight from a standard Mozilla CVS pull (see the Mozilla.org site for build instructions). That means a lot of the work done to make MiniMo 'lightweght' has had a direct effect on the 'main' Mozilla codebase.

    Mozilla and Firefox are mostly the same backend code. MiniMo has a different GUI f

  • Meh! 64 Megs (Score:5, Interesting)

    by cpct0 ( 558171 ) <slashdot.micheldonais@com> on Friday May 21, 2004 @02:47PM (#9218746) Homepage Journal
    Yes, another 64 megs comment.

    I'd love to have 64 megs of RAM for the devices I develop for.

    Reminder:
    - On J2ME, you have 64K of JAR size for most small devices. And that is in Java, mind you.
    - On J2ME, you have less than 200K or RAM, .classes included to run your soft.
    - On Brew, you have in the likes of 300-500K to run your software.
    - On Palm OS (older versions) you have 128K to run your stuff.
    - On most PocketPC, you have to restrain yourself to a few megs TOP. More than 4 megs and you are bound to have problems due to the small slider indicating how much RAM is allocated to storage and how much RAM is allocated to software.
    - On most Smartphones, you have to restrain yourself to maybe 8 megs.

    64 megs... *sheesh* I'd wish!

  • Palm OS browsers (Score:4, Interesting)

    by gearmonger ( 672422 ) on Friday May 21, 2004 @02:52PM (#9218788)
    Except for the lack of pop-up window handling and some of the "fancier" plug-ins (e.g., Flash), I've been pretty satisfied with the better Palm OS handheld browsers when viewing standards-compliant websites. It's when webmasters start catering their code to IE that screws things up most of the time.

    While I'd love to see the "ultimate" browser made for Palm OS, the fact that we have a few decent choices already may be why you're not hearing the chorus of "me too's" that you're hearing from the Pocket PC crowd. Or maybe it's that Palm OS users don't read /. (ha! beat you to it...muhahahaha).

  • naming problems (Score:3, Funny)

    by sewagemaster ( 466124 ) <(moc.liamg) (ta) (retsamegawes)> on Friday May 21, 2004 @04:53PM (#9220118) Homepage
    what about their previous problems with naming their product... here's what i got
    $ apt-cache search minimo
    aspell-gl-minimos - Aspell dictionary for Galician (minimos)
    igalician-minimos - Ispell dictionary for Galician (minimos)
    myspell-gl-es - The Galician dictionary for myspell
    wgalician-minimos - Wordlist for Galician (minimos)

  • uhhh.... (Score:3, Interesting)

    by ShadowRage ( 678728 ) on Friday May 21, 2004 @05:27PM (#9220476) Homepage Journal
    "The Minimo authors believe Minimo will become the browser of choice on embedded Linux devices with 64MB of RAM."

    64 mb of ram? what about the majority of embedded systems with less than this?

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