Mozilla details mobile browser plans
First, the good news: Mozilla has officially announces plans to "rock" the mobile web. Now, the bad: the true, legitimate Mobile Firefox (as opposed to the hackery that is Minimo) won't come until after Firefox 3 is released. Mozilla's Mike Schroepfer has detailed where the organization's headed with its mobile initiatives in a blog post this week, noting that Mozilla 2 will see mobile devices be promoted to tier 1 -- a move that means architectural decisions about the platform will be made specifically with handsets in mind. Although he says Minimo provided tons of valuable info on how Mozilla can be adapted to the small screen, it's being basically abandoned in favor of the true Mobile Firefox, a browser that'll take advantage of the heavyweight processors and storage afforded by modern phones. Opera Mini, get ready (finally) for some serious competition.[Via mocoNews]
Filed under: Software
Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)
fyreblazer @ Oct 12th 2007 11:37AM
THANK YOU!!! Minimo is horrendous. Unfortunately there's only room for 1 mobile browser in my heart and that is Picsel.
MatthewJ @ Oct 12th 2007 12:09PM
Excellent news!
paul34 @ Oct 12th 2007 12:59PM
Although I love Firefox and use it as my main browser...
1) Will this one also leak memory non-stop? Will Mozilla continue to ignore and not address the problem, rather than releasing user-implemented workarounds?
2) Will it still be slow to startup?
3) Will there still be severe tab lag when opening lots of tabs at once?
Ok, so this isn't even related to this post... but yea. Mozilla, come on, please =(
I love you guys but you gotta fix these issues ...
And yes they have gone on through multiple reformats. I can't track down the exact problem so its useless submitting a bug report.
Ibrahim @ Oct 14th 2007 1:30PM
I would hope that with the tiny main RAM of these phones, they wouldn't leak memory, but I think you can see why they are waiting until after Firefox 3 to work on this. Also, if you haven't heard, the Firefox 3 Alphas/Nightly builds use a lot less RAM and are generally more responsive than Firefox 2. Although there is still a while till 3 releases, and part of the speed may be because only one of my extensions (out of a usual 10 or so) works with the nightlies, I have great confidence that Firefox 3 will be a much better upgrade than 2 was. The bookmarking system is really much better, and I love the way the address bar autocompletes based on web page titles and tags too, not just the URL which most of the time you don't remember.
NuShrike @ Oct 12th 2007 3:12PM
This is just a PR move to avoid admitting they missed the boat and are way behind the curve. They were blindsided, just like everybody else, that Google and the iPhone ushered in the mobile web in a way PIE never really promoted and Opera Mini constantly pushed.