Doug Turner Details Minimo for Windows CE

Friday February 18th, 2005

Thank you for your interest in the Windows CE work we are doing. I have gotten alot of feedback from my posting to the newsgroup regarding help on building a great browser for Windows CE. I thought I would take this moment to tell you the progress I have made and point out a few areas where I think you can help.

So, as of today, if you had a bit of time, you could build yourself a browser that is based on the Mozilla source code.

I have been able to port Minimo — a smaller configuration of Mozilla over to Windows CE. The heavy lifting is mostly done with respect to porting. In fact, I have a iPAQ 6315 for a phone and it is the browser I use daily. There are a few loose ends such as XPTCall (http://www.mozilla.org/scriptable/xptcall-faq.html), build and config changes, https, and code reviews. Most of these items have people working on them. If you are interested in any, please let me know. The tracking bug for all things Windows CE related is here: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=277211.

Currently, I am building against the Pocket PC 2003 SDK. We may want to adjust this at some point, but I thought it would be acceptable place to start. The binary is 3.8MB compressed not including security. To run the build I have, you need about 5MB of memory to display www.google.com (this is a pretty soft number. I need a better tool to determine exact RSS usage — if you have a tool in mind, please let me know).

I have written up some notes on how to go about building this stuff. I don't claim the notes are perfect, but they are a start. Ideally, the notes will turn into a "how to build for Windows CE" webpage. If someone wants to help on this, please let me know. The notes are here: http://www.meer.net/~dougt/minimo_ce/NOTES.txt. The short term plan is to make building Windows CE very simple — as simple as building the Mozilla suite or Firefox.

The build works great on the device, but I am having some troubles getting things to compile for the emulator. Maybe someone can help here. I have toolwrappers (read my notes) for the emulator that I can send you. Just to note, it looks like libraries are building built but nothing is being exported.

On to the application itself...

If you try the build now you will find there is alot of Windows integration work that needs to happen. For example, we need to be able to get our app into the Start menu. I don't have a clue on how to do this yet and am hoping that one of you do.

Another thing you will notice is the UI for the application is terrible. I really need your input and Windows CE coding skills here. If you want to take a look at the current code for the application, it is here: http://lxr.mozilla.org/seamonkey/source/embedding/minimo/wince.

You can download a sneak peak at this build here: http://www.meer.net/~dougt/minimo_ce/MinimoCE_0.002.zip. Keep in mind, it is basically the second build that I made that actually rendered a page successfully. When you check it out, remember I told you: Lots of work to do; Lots of work to do.

If you find bugs, please write them up in Bugzilla: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/enter_bug.cgi?product=Minimo. For the Operating System, just simply select other. We are working on adding a Windows CE option.

Please let me know what you think and sign up for work if you can. We can't make this happen without you.

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