firefox for mobiles

David Ford david at blue-labs.org
Fri May 11 21:02:15 CEST 2007


For the same reason I use open office instead of vi.  Lynx is far from
capable.

Even with tuning, FF is a dastard piggy.  I've tested things with FF. 
Start it with no history, no recovered session.  Load up digg.com and do
nothing.  Just let it sit there.  It will sit there and slowly grow and
grow and grow.  The caching isn't the problem, that's tunable.  The
problem is the memory leaks -- all the valgrind reports turned into moz
teams (and ignored).

Unless the current mozilla paradigm is changed, putting a moz product on
a cellphone is not just asking but demanding people reboot their phones
very often.  I put minimo on my cellphone and I know once I use minimo,
I can use my phone for about 12 hours or less before it gets so sluggish
that I have to pull the battery out to reboot it because it won't
respond to the power button any more.  If I manage to get to the task
list and kill minimo, it gets snappy again instantly.

Mozilla are a great group of people and ideas and I've been very
impressed with all the things that have been accomplished. 
Unfortunately pretty much everyone racing to eclipse them with browsers
that are far faster, more W3C compliant, and just overall better at
things.  Mozilla seem intent on stagnating.  Serious bugs (design flaws)
that have been around for years are dismissed as "there isn't a right
way to do it."  Like fixed position background images and page
scrolling.  Alpha blending - transparent images with a background. 
Turns powerhouse desktop browsing into a horridly choppy stalling
experience.

I just can't envision Mozilla building a useful product for smart phones
whether it's the Neo or any other phone.

The neo is far from being a powerhouse device and sadly the M$ browser
engine is far more capable and blindingly faster than minimo is.

Bradley Hook wrote:
> While FF does have a fairly large footprint, I've never had these kinds
> of memory consumption problems. I generally leave my FF sessions open
> for days or weeks at home, and I simultaneously load 3D games, OOo,
> graphics apps, and other stuff without ever having trouble with memory
> (granted I do have 2GB).
>
> However, even the large memory footprint that I do see has an
> explanation, and can be tuned by tweaking about:config. By default, FF
> caches every page loaded on every tab for that sessions. If you consider
> a geek's multi-day surfing session, that is a lot of data to cache, and
> the cache data also can't be compressed. Since the primary target of FF
> is the "average" user -- which has several short surfing sessions and
> usually closes the browser between sessions -- the default settings make
> sense. If this is not your surfing style, then change your settings.
>
> That said, the full blown browser would be an awfully hefty app to put
> on a phone, and the minimo browser is currently targeting windows
> portables. Why not go with something with a tiny footprint, time-tested
> and proven.... lynx anyone?
>
> ~Bradley





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