N810

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Fennec Alpha 1

October 17, 2008 in Beta, Design, Fennec, Firefox, Mobile, Mozilla, N800, N810 | 4 comments

Fennec, which is the code name we’re using for the lead-up to a mobile version of Firefox, has reached an important milestone: Alpha 1.  Mark has details up on his blog, including some good feeedback from people trying it out.

We’ve got builds for the Maemo platform.  We also have builds for Linux Desktop, Mac and Windows so that extensions authors can start hacking as well. See Mark’s blog for some download links.

Congrats to the team for reaching this milestone.  It’s a great start.  Next up: on to lots of polish, finish and performance work. And Windows Mobile.

Madhava was nice enough to do a video that shows Fennec on-device.


Fennec Alpha Walkthrough from Madhava Enros on Vimeo.

fennec on the big screen

July 30, 2008 in Fennec, Mobile, Mozilla, N800, N810 | 3 comments

This image was taken from the overhead projector during Jay’s morning talk about mobile.

flashblock port to MicroB

July 18, 2008 in Embedding, Fennec, Firefox, Linux, Mobile, Mozilla, N800, N810 | 3 comments

Pretty neat to see someone ported over flashblock to run on MicroB on the N810. I haven’t looked at the code to see how they do it, but I’ll bet it was a rough ride since that’s written in C and C++, not in XUL. (I also assume that Antonio did this work?)

As we continue to bring up Fennec it will be interesting to see how fast we can start migrating add-ons over to support Fennec. It will be a different experience, but many of the same pieces will be there so having support for Firefox for the desktop and Firefox on your mobile device will likely be possible. (Mark, correct me if I’m wrong.)

whatwg video support for your phone

April 3, 2008 in Firefox, Freedom, GNOME, Linux, Mobile, Mozilla, N800, N810, Open Web, Red Hat, Video, XULRunner | 11 comments

Above is a video that I took of Chris Double’s awesome whatwg video work running on my N810. Note that I didn’t have to do anything special to get this to work. I took the two patches, applied them to my trunk mozilla build and ran them through the ARM toolchain. The code works out of the box with the gstreamer backend that’s included on the N810.

I thought that it was important to show that we’re not just serious about adding video support to Mozilla, but that it can extend to a wide range of devices. If we want to have a world that includes rich internet applications, we have to be sure that includes phones and lower end devices as well.

The video itself is a speech that Cory Doctorow gave at the 2006 Red Hat Summit about copyright and intellectual property. I thought it was fitting.

If you’re a crazy maemo hacker you can get a copy of the build from my people page that includes gstreamer support. Follow Brad’s instructions to get a browser front end once you’re installed xulrunner somewhere. If you want to play a video you should make sure that you’ve encoded it for the N810 using a decent script to take advantage of the hardware accel on the device. Hack up an html page, embed the video like on Chris’ test page and try it out.

mozilla mobile performance

April 1, 2008 in Firefox, GNOME, Mobile, Mozilla, N800, N810 | 56 comments

For the Firefox 3 release cycle, we’ve done a huge amount of work on various parts of the browser. Memory usage has been reduced, performance has been vastly increased and we’ve done a huge amount of work on building features that our users will love. Each of these add up to a really great browser.

But one of the nice side effects of all that work is how well it’s prepared us for the mobile market. We’ve been ramping up those efforts and we’ve been doing some measurement on ARM systems, in particular on the N800 and N810 series tablets.

The blue bar is the “MicroB browser” which is the Mozilla-based browser that Nokia included with their OS2008 release. It’s based on source code from around the Firefox Alpha 1 timeframe. The red bar above is the “Fennec browser” – the code name we’re using for our new mobile web browser and is based off of post-Firefox 3 beta 4 source code. The summary here is that on ARM that a Firefox 3-based browser is a whopping 5.9x faster than earlier Mozilla versions. The really interesting fact here is that multiplier is higher on ARM than it is on x86! So the great performance work that we’ve done has actually paid dividends more on ARM than it has on the desktop. A great side effect.

Note: if you feel like you want to take part in our mobile project you’re more than welcome to join us. We’re just getting started on the browser side and making some pretty good progress. A super early snapshot of a test browser is available from vlad’s page. If you click on that link from the N810 browser you will be prompted to install the browser. It will pull down two packages and install them and then it will put a Fennec browser in your Extras category on the N810. We don’t actually recommend that people try this on the N800 yet – we still need to add support for the soft keyboard but the N810 works pretty well. This UI has only seen work over the last week or two and we’re just starting to get a handle on the bugs and the the design.

If you use the browser above you’ll notice that we’re pretty early in the process. But it’s nice to know that we’re starting off from such a great place in terms of performance.

Update: Mark Finkle posted about XULRunner at just about the same time that I did! He lists a bunch of bugs we care about and also mentions that we’re cranking on extensions and add-ons as well for mobile.

It’s going to be a different world once we’re done.

new xulrunner builds for maemo

March 18, 2008 in GNOME, Mobile, Mozilla, N800, N810, XULRunner | No comments

Brad has posted builds of xulrunner built for Maemo. He also includes some links to some XUL apps you can try. He also includes links to some of the browser test UIs that we’ve been experimenting with, including a full pan/touch/zoom interface browser. (Look for the Touchscreen-atotic link. It’s pretty damn hot, and very experimental.) The MyBrowser UI that someone did a while ago should be good enough to run performance tests and browse around a bit. It’s also listed there.

But mostly this is the first step to bringing all that Firefox 3 size and speed hotness to one of our first mobile platforms. Enjoy!