Mozilla Minimo Under Development For Windows CE

[Janak Parekh]

<div class='os_post_top_link'><a href='http://www.mozillazine.org/talkback.html?article=6072' target='_blank'>http://www.mozillazine.org/talkback...ml?article=6072</a><br /><br /></div><i>"Lead Minimo developer Doug Turner has confirmed that he is working on a Windows CE version of Minimo. Minimo is a version of Mozilla for small devices, which up until now has been built for Linux-based PDAs. Microsoft's Windows CE operating system is the basis of the Windows Mobile platform, which powers a variety of Pocket PCs and Smartphones. Windows CE builds of Minimo are expected in a few weeks. Doug is looking for help too: 'So, here is a general call for Windows CE developers! If you are interested in Mozilla on Windows CE and have time to help me with some of the work, please drop me a line.'"</i><br /><br />This is great news. :D If any of you Pocket PC developers amongst the crowd want to participate, click through and drop him a line. I'd love to see Minimo hit Pocket PCs -- Pocket IE isn't quite flexible or powerful enough for my tastes.

[gorkon280]

My god is this great news. Pocket IE totally sucks. It's better then say, the new AvantGo CLient( :devilboy: ) but we have LONG needed a better (and free) browser for Pocket PC and I am willing to give up the RAM to use it.

[Stephen Beesley]

Even though I am fairly happy with NetFront as my browser of choice I would love to see this come to the Pocket PC. An open source project of this importance to the platform (especially given the obvious limits of PIE ) would be great to see .

[stlbud]

I guess this is a chicken or egg kind of thing. There have been other browsers for Pocket PC but they all suffer from an extreme lack of content on the web. Not to mention the difficulty and expense of gaining access to the web in the first place. I hope this interest brings a renewed interest in developing web content for a small screen. It seems that there are fewer sites supporting a Pocket PC every day. Even sites that are supposed to be Pocket PC Centric (if that's a valid term) have dropped their Pocket PC formatted pages. Thank goodness Pocket PC Thoughts is not one of them. :)

Bill B.

[Stephen Beesley]

I have actually been finding a lack of PPC formated sites not to be a problem since I have been using NetFont. Most sites seem to render pretty well.

[Perry Reed]

Sweet! This would resolve one of the Pocket PC's most glaring weaknesses: the lousy Pocket IE.

(The other IMHO, the lack of HTML email, is solved by WebIS's @Mail.)

[Wiggster]

I think it's about time to PayPal some funds to that there Minimo team :wink:

[kanoswrx]

Thank god they are working on this, the Pocket IE is so bad. I will gladly give them some money for a firefox type browser on the ppc.

[Paragon]

Ok, so who has used Minimo on other platforms such as Linux? What do you guys think of it? Is it time to get excited or not?

Dave

[lorettaboy]

Yeah, that's a great question. Does anybody have a link to a review of minimo for linux devices?

[galt]

I have actually been finding a lack of PPC formated sites not to be a problem since I have been using NetFont. Most sites seem to render pretty well.

I agree, and I hope the Minimo developers don't use PIE as the benchmark for PPC browsers. I think it would be great if they were able to replicate the feature set of NetFront but more stable and with a smaller footprint.

*Edit* - Found this (http://news.zdnet.co.uk/internet/0,39020369,39179896,00.htm) regarding the Minimo browser for mobile devices (not necessarily PPC): "A lot of browsers ignore frames or have limited Javascript support -- they do terrible jobs," said Turner. "With Minimo, if it renders OK in Firefox, it will render OK in Minimo." The technology works by shrinking less important images, such as banner ads, and wrapping columns around to make a single column, so that users only need to scroll vertically. " Sounds nice. :)

[Paragon]

"With Minimo, if it renders OK in Firefox, it will render OK in Minimo."

That sounds very promising, unless the rest of that statement reads but it takes about a minute and a half :)

Dave

[marcm]

As soon as this comes out, I'll download it for sure. PIE, even with PIEPlus is horrible! :roll: Sounds promising though! :D

[beq]

Just curious, how would ThunderHawk (subscription model with optimizing proxy) compare with the others here (NetFront, PIEPlus, Minimo, etc)?

Also, does NetFront work well (ie. further improved) or not by going through Skweezer optimizing portal?

[Craig Horlacher]

I'll be the first to install it. I paid for netfront and it's ok but I've been stunned at how bad they are at keeping it up to date. It still doesn't support 640x480 on the pocket pc which just blows me away!!! Don't any of the people to made it actually use it? I can kind of use it in "Real vga" mode and especially in landscape pages look really good but that's only after to turn off the address bar which you can tell they never tested at highres or "real vga" mode.

All I ask for is netfront like browsing (I love the formatting options), tabs, and good vga support!

[Wiggster]

Looks like we all need to update our sites to add mobile recognition based on Minimo being in the useragent (if you've downloaded Minimo, you'll see the useragent is Mozilla/5.0 (X11; ;U; Familiar 0.72; en-US; rv: 1.7a) Gecko/2004/0218 Minimo/0.1).

Normal Pocket PC Thoughts on Minimo:
http://www.wiggster.com/images/Minimo1.jpg

Seems Minimo isn't VGA-aware yet. Oh, well, maybe by the time it's a 1.0 release :mrgreen:

[Stephen Beesley]

I agree, and I hope the Minimo developers don't use PIE as the benchmark for PPC browsers. I think it would be great if they were able to replicate the feature set of NetFront but more stable and with a smaller footprint.

I'll be the first to install it. I paid for netfront and it's ok but I've been stunned at how bad they are at keeping it up to date. It still doesn't support 640x480 on the pocket pc which just blows me away!!! Don't any of the people to made it actually use it? I can kind of use it in "Real vga" mode and especially in landscape pages look really good but that's only after to turn off the address bar which you can tell they never tested at highres or "real vga" mode.

All I ask for is netfront like browsing (I love the formatting options), tabs, and good vga support!

This morning on the commute to work I had an unexplained and very unexpected hard reset on my Toshiba - of course on the day that I left the card with my backups at home! Anyway, as a result I found myself browsing the net at lunchtime (over wifi) using plain ol' PIE of the WM2003 variety and boy does it suck. I had really forgotten what a bad job it does of formatting pages and really missed having more than one page open at a time.

The experience got me thinking about what I would want out of a new browser and really would have to pretty much agree with the above comments. I would love to see the formatting options that NetFront provides - they seem to do a pretty good job of most sites. On the other hand, however, it would be nice if any new browser had a smaller footprint and took up less screen space with its toolbars etc.

Here's hoping...!

[tange1]

Hey Everyone! I just driffted over here from aximsite.com As most of you probally know minimo beta is release and there are currently 2 beta releases of it: .001 and .002. Both are functional but are very raw and very buggy. Links can be found below. I am in contact with the creator of minimo and am helping in the debugging and request area. Listed below are known bugs and requests. I was hoping to find some users here who are as excited as I am about minimo to help test and debug. If you would reply to this thread or private msg me any bugs or requests you find it would be appreciated

I can also answer some questions if they come up.

Links:

http://www.mozilla.org/projects/minimo/ - General Info about minimo

http://www.meer.net/~dougt/minimo_ce/ - download location *note* you should only need the newest version zip file. Extract to a location and copy the folder to your PPC.


Tested thus far on an Axim x3i:
Minimo .002
Bugs/requests found:

1. Links clicked do not open the page (nor do buttons such as google's search button)

2. Full versions of site are loaded rather than mobile versions (this may be an issue with the code on the website rather than the browser, I'm not sure)

3. Highlighting of text has problems, no way to copy the text (?)

4. Future VGA support?

5. Scrolling issue's possible smooth scrolling in future releases?

6. Page shifting to see what you are typing if the keyboard covers the text entry field

7. Menu's that would normally pop by hitting the arrow to allow you to choose items (Like choosing your state from a list) do not seem to function and the arrow you would click appears as a very large button.

8. Support to minimize the browser via the X button (or to close the browser) would be beneficial.