Mozilla releases first mobile Firefox browser (CNET) [LWN.net]

CNET looks at Mozilla's release of Firefox 1.0 for Maemo (aka "Fennec"). "Firefox for the Maemo 5 platform has a few interesting conceits that set it apart from other mobile browsers, like Opera Mobile and Opera Mini. Mozilla is banking on the uniqueness of its claim to fame—third-party, customizable browser extensions—to help its browser win mobile market share. Add-ons, after all, helped make Firefox the top browser alternative to Internet Explorer in the desktop space."

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Mozilla releases first mobile Firefox browser (CNET)

Posted Feb 1, 2010 16:19 UTC (Mon) by Kit (guest, #55925) [Link]

Mozilla is going to have to be careful with add-ons for mobile Firefox. Extensions are always getting blamed for the slowness/memory leaks of the desktop version, and that problem is only going to be exacerbated on a constrained mobile platform.

It would be nice if Firefox could implement features similar to Chrome's Task Manager, which shows the memory/CPU consumption of each of the extensions (along with the tabs), which'd enable users to at least have an idea if one of their extensions is actually leaky and buggy instead of just having no idea.

Mozilla releases first mobile Firefox browser (CNET)

Posted Feb 1, 2010 16:54 UTC (Mon) by bcombee (guest, #40068) [Link]

One of the big projects inside Mozilla right now is called Electrolysis -- it's a process model where content (page rendering, DOM, Javascript) runs separately from chrome (XUL/the user interface, network access). The Mobile version is set to be the first big user of this as it looks to provide some major benefits with responsiveness, since the UI isn't blocked on code/plugins running in the page, and if done correctly, it would allow us or an extension to provide that per-tab information you like in Chrome.

See https://wiki.mozilla.org/Electrolysis for more details on where it's at.

Mozilla releases first mobile Firefox browser (CNET)

Posted Feb 1, 2010 16:57 UTC (Mon) by flewellyn (subscriber, #5047) [Link]

Good! Switching to a multiprocess model like Google Chrome will help things hugely. Google will thus have succeeded.

HTML 5

Posted Feb 6, 2010 23:46 UTC (Sat) by shane (subscriber, #3335) [Link]

I just googled for an HTML 5 demo and went there with Firefox on my N900. The videos played, but were a bit too jerky for real viewing. This is the same as most Flash-based video on the device - sound is smooth but you're watching a very fast slideshow.

Downloaded video tends to work fine using the default media player, so in primciple there is enough CPU for web video.

I guess this means the CPU is on the edge of the needed performance. Perhaps some future tweaking will improve HTML 5 video performance, but I'm not that hopeful.

HTML 5

Posted Feb 12, 2010 11:21 UTC (Fri) by DonDiego (subscriber, #24141) [Link]

What sort of HTML 5 demo? I hear that fennec uses system libraries to decode video. Was it Theora or H.264?

HTML 5

Posted Feb 12, 2010 11:57 UTC (Fri) by shane (subscriber, #3335) [Link]

This was:

http://html5demos.com/

It seems to have both MP4 and OGV versions of the video. I don't know what Firefox is using - I assume the OGV but I don't know how one would check.

HTML 5

Posted Feb 12, 2010 17:51 UTC (Fri) by Trelane (subscriber, #56877) [Link]

Fennec uses, or perhaps will use, gstreamer. So it'll support whatever GStreamer plugins you have, including DSP accelerated-ones if you have it.