Nokia Device Using MozillaMonday January 22nd, 2001ERICmurphy writes: ... and got Mozilla into their consumer package. Might help raise its profile amongst ordinary users - if AOL users can be classified as such ;) Unfortunately, AOL has a contract with Microsoft where they have to use Internet Explorer as their core browser. According to reports I have heard, the contract term will expire in another year or two. Take a look at Instant AOL for an example and you will see that not only does it use Gecko, but it also runs on Mobile Linux. It uses a 366 Celeron & 32MB of RAM. Moz is gonna run slower than molasses. They should have included a stripped down browser to make browsing a snap. well, i guess it will be enough. they don't need any other processes besides xfree and mozilla. this should be possible within 32 megs. and they said "at least", maybe it will get some more ram later? Yeah, but Celeron 366? Besides, they will need the TCP/IP stack and bunch of supporting services which will add up ram. To run Moz effortlessly in this enviromment, you need at least PIII 500/600 with 128mb Ram. Note that it says on the Nokia website it's atleast a Celeron 366. It also says "Mozilla browser - enhanced for PAL/NTSC screen displays." The ethernet is optional, so mozilla would be more than adequate for a 56K modem. I use Mozilla (well NN6 actually) on my home machine which is actually slower at 333 MHz, although it does have 128 MB RAM. It runs fine. (Admittedly, this is a Win2K system, not Linux, but I presume performance should be similar.) I happened to look at memory usage last night and NN6 had around 12 MB allocated, with a max allocation (after I'd been using it a little bit, several windows) of around 25 MB. Those figures are not implausible on a 32 MB system that is running nothing else. Also, the low screen resolution (e.g. 640x480 or so) might make some aspects of performance less poor than on a typical desktop machine, although I'm sure that is hardly the most significant performance factor. I think it'll work ok (and I presume that there is also a chance of more performance improvements in Mozilla as time goes on). If it needs more memory they will add more memory - big deal. Embedded systems are one of the coolest areas of potential for Mozilla use... I hope this one works out. --sam "(Admittedly, this is a Win2K system, not Linux, but I presume performance should be similar.)" Actually it isn't. Mozilla performance on Linux, f.e. my K6-2 400Mhz 192MB RAM box, is much worse than the same box booted into Windows. It takes longer to load most web pages than Netscape 4.x, and I often wait several seconds after taking a UI action (clicking on a menu title, selecting a mail message to read) before Mozilla responds to the event (and several seconds longer for it to complete it). I notice, however, that the article says the device is coming out in the 2nd quarter of this year, which means there is plenty of time for Nokia to optimize Mozilla for speed on Linux. I expect this is what they will do, and that's good news for Mozilla and good news for Linux users. Cool. :-) At least PIII 500/600 with 128 MB RAM??? Are YOU smoking crack? Ok, my box has now 192 MB, but Mozilla was running also fine with 64 MB, and this is a PII-400 (ok, that's also more than Nokia's minimal reqirements, true). I'm currently using 108 MB of RAM, and my Mozilla is running *quite fast* with Java2 1.3 on a full featured KDE2 and lots of other stuff running (xchat, xmms, konqueror, licq etc.) So I think that, on a Linux system - which doesn't use 70 MB of RAM just for loading the OS (as my Win98SE did) - they can do it with a Celeron 366 though I think they should use 64 MB of RAM, so it will work quite a bit better... Am I smoking crack? Not at the moment. My AMD k6-2 300mhz with 64mb ran Moz on Caldera Linux eDesktop 2.4 (with KDE2 as well) unacceptably slow. In fact, I couldn't take - I had to use Konqueror. I upgraded my system to 160mb and it runs much better. The loading time went down 50%. So, I just don't see how you can say that Moz can run fast on 64mb. There is just going to be too much disk swapping. Just think about it. Linux itself is gonna take a big chunk, then KDE, XFree, PPP stack, etc... and then Moz takes about 20mb once you go to a couple of pages. Start the mail client (which I assume Nokia will want to include) and you are up to 25-26mb. It simply doesn't compute. Mozilla.org can't continue to be oblivious to reality and set 128mb as the recommended requirement well... they don't need kde? just linux, xfree, mozilla, that would be enough. maybe a simple windowmanager, but i think mozilla could be it's own windowmanager. they could even try to avoid xfree, if someone would port mozilla to either qt-embedded or gtk-embedded. 32 mb COULD be enough, 64 mb WILL be enough. Nokia know what they're doing they'll make sure that moz will run at an acceptable speed. It's going to be tested throughly, if Mozilla doesn't perform well enough then they may have to up the spec slightly but they won't ship the product with a slow browser. Shouldn't they wait a few months for version 1.0. The mozilla developers are doing a great job lately in fixing bugs. However, people seem to eager to wait for a proper release. Netscape already made the mistake of releasing netscape 6. Though remarkably stable, this version of mozilla contains lots of bugs and should IMHO never have been released. According to the roadmap, we can expect version 0.8 in just a few weeks. Can't wait :) \\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\"this version of mozilla contains lots of bugs and should IMHO never have been released.\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\" What are you talking about? The 0.7 release? Of course it has bugs; it is basically just a revised nightly build from over a month ago. The 0.x releases are just a formality for benchmarking long term progress and so that 3rd party developers can have a stable basis to build from. Regarding the time frame - it says that it will be coming out in 2nd quarter. That means April or later. If things continue to progress as they have lately, there is a good chance that 1.0 could be ready in time. If Nokia has their own programmers working on optimizing their own variation then they can surely get all the relevant bugs out in time. I wasn't talking about nightly builds I was talking about netscape 6. This version is advertised as release quality code, superficial testing shows within minutes that it is not. 0.7 is a lot better already, and in fact most nightly builds of the past month are better IMHO. Now we see another anounced release Nokia and I can't help but wonder why the hell they are using stuff that is not considered to be worthy of a 1.0 release by its own developers. They are going to sell this product to customers while they know the software is not yet release quality. Stuff like that bothers me. It's not good for the developers, it's not good for the customers. I just tried the embeded version of mozilla and i am amazed by how fast it is!! What exactly is it that is stripped away? (besides the GUI) Why havent anyone (i cant...) made a decent GUI to it? Where did you get the stripped down version? http://ftp.mozilla.org/pub/mozilla/nightly/latest/embed-i686-pc-linux-gnu.tar.gz or... http://ftp.mozilla.org/pub/mozilla/nightly/latest/embed-win32.zip I just tried the embed version. Its blinding fast. WOW!!! Bravo to the mozilla crew!!! Where exactly is Mozilla itself slowing down? Since the embed builds generally include XUL (by my understanding; correct me if I'm wrong), the bottleneck's not there (unless the perceived slowdown really is just due to the linear decrease in performance expected when there is more code to interpret). XUL by itself doesn't do much. It is when you use to render things like toolbar, statusbar, sidebar, preferences, etc... Has Nokia released any of their changes to the mozilla source tree yet? |