Submitted by A review of Minimo, the Mozilla-bazed browser for Windows Mobile devices. “I was very impressed with Minimo. Actually, using Minimo showed me that mobile net access might just work. Everyone has been predicting the mobile revolution but I never thought it would happen simply because the screen are too small and the interfaces cramped. Somehow, Minimo sidesteps all these and made a convert of me.”
I’m posting this from my treo. mobile web browsing is great. sure a lot of sites don’t load well or at all, but there are quite a few optimized for phones. like OSNews.
I use my treo for surfing, checking email, IMing and SSH every day. I feel lost without it
Browser: Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows 95; PalmSource; Blazer 3.0) 16;160×160
Minimo is really high on requirements. Most phones don’t come with 20-25 MBs of free RAM that minimo requires to even start working. This is the big showstopper for Minimo: RAM. Maybe in 3-4 years the market would allow it to flourish, as long as Minimo’s requirements don’t also go up.
You’re right that RAM is an isssue, but I managed to run it with less than 20MB of free RAM. There was a slight (but noticeable) lag, but it was fine for browsing.
I would hope though that they decrease its memory footprint now rather than wait 3 years for the devices to catch up!
20 MBs of free RAM is the absolute minimum for Minimo, and that’s for browsing light/mobile sites only. It requires over 25 MBs of RAM if you need to render CNN for example.
In comparison, and that’s what the mobile manufacturers expect, Netfront requires about 3 MBs of RAM to render light sites, Opera Mobile 4 MBs (not Mini), Nokia WebKit 8 MBs, Openwave 2 MBs and Obigo 2 MBs (Openwave and Obigo can even run at 512 KB of RAM, but that’s just for absolute minimum WML sites).
Please note that before Nokia going with Webkit for their next-gen Symbian browser, they did evaluate and contribute code to Mozilla. But things just didn’t work. They could’t shrink it enough. So, they went with Webkit (which is also high-demanding compared to others, just not as much as Mozilla).
As you can see, Minimo’s 20 MBs of requirement is not an option for the market. Sure, it is a cool toy for us geeks (I have it installed on my Dell x50v PDA), but it would never get incorporated professionally in any smartphone. Not for at least 5 more years.
I wonder if there is any way to run any of those browsers (not minimo though) on a standard desktop/laptop computer, specially Opera Mini… I´d like to see how they compare to Dillo, Links, etc.
Opera Mini requires a JavaME runtime, so even if Opera Mini itself only requires less than 1 MB of RAM to operate (because it’s a client browser rendering optimized content coming from Norway’s servers, it is not a full browser), the Java runtime and emulator that it requires need over 15-20 MBs of RAM. So that will bring you nothing if you are asking that just because you want to use low-mem apps.
My PDA is all of two years old, so I can’t try this out. If I was allowed to upgrade my OS, that would be a different matter. Oh well. Pocket Opera is great.
Afaik, it does support WM2003, at least 6 months ago it did.
0.2 broke that.
Then that’s stupid, because there are still millions of WM2003 users out there. About 12 million of them.
I’ve tried a number of web-browsers for my Pocket LOOX 720 (which is actually more powerful than most PDAs – or at least this was the case not too long ago)
I’ve found most of them to be lacking (Microsofts own lacked functionality and Minimoo was slow on even my system). The only browser I’ve found that did the PDA any justice was Pocket Opera.
imo Minimoo still has a great deal of develeopment to undertake before it can compete with Opera.
From the way this guy writes about “mobile revolution”, he sure makes it seem like he’s never used Opera Mobile/Mini. You’d think someone so interested in it would have by now, right?
Opera is the next review! And MS Deepfish.