MozillaZine

Overview of Minimo from the Project Leaders

Tuesday May 25th, 2004

LinuxDevices.com has an introduction to the Minimo project, written by the project leaders. The report explains the aims of Minimo, describes how the developers have tackled some of the problems associated with browsing the Web on small devices and reveals why they chose to target devices with 64MB of memory. Slashdot has a discussion about the article, which is how we heard about it.

#1 Applicable to Mozilla too?

by polidobj

Wednesday May 26th, 2004 6:55 AM

There are 2 things mentioned that really need to be done in regular mozilla too. The things mentioned that I'd like to see are the zoom feature and the work to fix memory leaks. I've seen complaints about both of these in the forums.

#2 Re: Applicable to Mozilla too?

by bzbarsky

Wednesday May 26th, 2004 9:08 AM

Almost all back-end work on minimo (this includes memory leak fixes) is in fact checked into the Mozilla trunk. I'm not sure what makes people think this is a fork; it's not.

#3 Re: Re: Applicable to Mozilla too?

by polidobj

Wednesday May 26th, 2004 3:18 PM

Thanks! What the difference in Minimo then, the build configuration? And what's the status of the zoom feature? Is bug 4821 the one to watch on this? http://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=4821

#4 Re: Re: Re: Applicable to Mozilla too?

by bzbarsky

Wednesday May 26th, 2004 4:01 PM

Minimo is mostly build configuration, yes, as I understand it. A lot of the work I've seen checked in for Minimo has been focusing on things like making it possible to disable XUL support at build time, ifdef out image decoders and protocol handlers on a one-by-one basis, etc.

For zoom, I think we're aiming to fix the use of units in Gecko first (search for "units in Gecko" to find the bug; I don't have the number offhand). Then zoom should be pretty straightforward....

#7 Re: Re: Re: Re: Applicable to Mozilla too?

by mlefevre

Thursday May 27th, 2004 3:55 AM

That would be http://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=pixels . Who needs numbers when you have aliases? ;)

#5 Great for Linux PDAs, but...

by mozkeith

Wednesday May 26th, 2004 4:27 PM

...the majority of handheld units sold today (can't say for how long, though) are running PalmOS. It's a shame there doesn't seem to be anyone looking at getting this fine browser to build on that OS. The ever-popular Treo 600 has a decent browser, but if it could run Mozilla...man.

#6 Re: Great for Linux PDAs, but...

by jsebrech

Thursday May 27th, 2004 3:45 AM

Somehow I doubt the porting job would be easy, with palmos having always been the odd one out in the os game.

Besides, the treo 600 has 32 megs of memory, and minimo targets 64 meg systems.