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."
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Member since:2005-06-28
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.
Member since:
2005-07-06
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!