http://blog.wired.com/monkeybites/2008/01/they-shrunk-my.html

Quote :

"They Shrunk My Firefox: Mozilla Shows off Mobile Mockups By Scott Gilbertson EmailJanuary 25, 2008 | 10:46:20 mobilefox.jpgAs we mentioned a while back, Mozilla is working on a mobile version of Firefox and now the company has taken the wraps off some of its initial design ideas, offering a first glimpse of what mobile Firefox may look like. Keep in mind that this preview is largely intended to gather community feedback and the final release of Firefox mobile may well be very different. The final version Firefox mobile is expect to arrive sometime in 2008. The initial design reveals that Mozilla has forked the project slightly with one design targeting touch screen devices, like the iPhone or other smart PDA-style devices, and a second design for more tradition cellphones where the screen is smaller and navigation is limited to the keyboard. The more interesting of the two, the touch screen interface, looks remarkably similar to Apple’s mobile version of Safari, though it borrows some ideas from Firefox 3 as well. The title bar is relatively simple with a stop/reload button, an address/search bar and the star-bookmarking button found in the Firefox 3 betas. The star button itself has a dual actions, one tap shows a list of your bookmarks, while a double tap will bookmark the current page. Although it hasn’t been included in these early mockups, it seems that bookmark syncing will happen through the recently announced Weave project. As with mobile Safari, the page navigation is at the bottom of the screen with back/forward buttons as well as zoom controls and a tab switch button with previews. The tab switching button brings up a 2x2 grid of your open tabs with any additional tabs requiring a second click to page through. So far no word from Mozilla on whether or not they plan to build an iPhone-specific version to take advantage of pinch zooming or any of the other finger gesture features on the iPhone. The non-touch screen version of mobile Firefox is, as you might expect, somewhat more barebones, though it does feature a very nice scroll/zoom interface for keypad navigation. Of course for many the real appeal of Mobile Firefox will lie with the extensions and so far the mockups haven’t revealed any details about how extensions will be installed or managed. Still, despite being somewhat limited, the early preview shows the Firefox mobile is well under way and it looks quite nice so far. If you’d like to play round with the mobile interface, the XUL mockups are available for download in both touchscreen and normal versions."

1/25/2008 11:46:10 AM

finally getting closer

1/25/2008 11:52:38 AM

Dear Mobile Firefox team:

Please hurry. I hate IE on my phone so much.

Signed, Axelay

1/25/2008 3:16:50 PM

Opera is great! Although youtube only works on my windows mobile phone with IE.

1/26/2008 9:12:37 PM

http://blog.wired.com/monkeybites/2008/03/firefox-3-troun.html

Quote :

"Firefox 3 Trounces IE, Opera and Safari in Memory Tests By Scott Gilbertson EmailMarch 18, 2008 | 9:30:06 AMCategories: browsers, software Since it entered the beta testing phase late last year, Firefox 3 has seen a steady reduction in the amount of memory the browser consumes on the desktop. Now only weeks from a final release, Mozilla's Firefox 3 has been shown to use significantly less memory than Internet Explorer 7 or Opera — long the browser to beat when it comes to memory use. Almost a year ago, we wrote a piece for Wired.com calling Firefox 2 a memory hog and questioning the browser’s future in light of its bloat. But the good news for Firefox fans is that those days will soon be a thing of the past. According to recent performance tests, Firefox 3 uses 60 percent less memory than the current Firefox 2 on Windows. That’s good news for Mozilla, which is hoping to take the mobile world by storm later this year. Couple the improved memory use with some coming improvements in the way Firefox 3 handles multiple page requests and you’ve got a recipe for what could be a fastest browser around. And Mozilla isn’t the only source for impressive Firefox 3 memory tests. Ars Technica recently pitted the latest Firefox 3 beta 4 (see our review) against IE 7, Safari 3.0.4 beta and Opera 9.5 beta and found that Firefox 3 came out on top, using just 200 MB of RAM. The other browsers ranged from nearly IE 7's whopping 500 MB to Opera 9.5 beta which was Firefox’s closest competitor, using 250 MB of RAM. Both sets of tests involved fairly typical browsing sessions — opening multiple tabs, cycling windows and closing tabs and windows. Of course outside factors like add-ons and extensions will affect performance somewhat, but Mozilla has reached out to add-on developers in an effort to reduce memory usage there as well. I’ve been running Firefox 3 beta 4 as my main browser in Mac OS X since it was released. My experience has been that Firefox very rarely reaches 200MB of RAM. My current setup includes the AdBlock Plus add-on, Firebug, Better Gmail, Better Google Reader, StumbleUpon, DownThemAll, Weave, Prism, Google Notebook, Total Validator and Greasemonkey, though Greasemonkey is currently disabled since it doesn’t support beta 4 yet. The same set of extensions running in Firefox 2 uses around 500MB on average and sometimes, after having 30+ tabs open for the better part of day, that number climbs to the 1 GB mark. It's worth noting that Activity Monitor in OS X can be slightly misleading, but the inaccuracy would be reflected in both cases. That Firefox 3 uses less than half the memory of its predecessor shouldn’t be a surprise since reducing the memory footprint has been one of Mozilla's main goals from the beginning. Stuart Parmenter, a Mozilla developer, has written a detailed analysis of how the team went about slimming down Firefox. The main areas that have been improved include much reduced memory fragmentation — a common issue with long-running apps like a browser — better cache handling and better image management. The last item, improved image management, is particularly significant. Firefox 2 stores images in memory even if they’re in background tabs that haven’t been viewed in hours. For Firefox 3 the storage and retrieval of images was changed so that background elements are dumped from memory when the image isn’t in the focused window. The short term benefit of the reduced memory footprint is a faster Firefox 3 and that’s good news for those of us using Firefox as our primary browser. But in the long run, the far more significant development may be seen on mobile platforms. So far, Mozilla hasn’t developed a mobile browser to compete with Opera or Safari, but now that Firefox is a lean mean machine, and development of Firefox Mobile is slowly getting underway, before long Firefox may be the fastest browser on your phone."

3/19/2008 9:59:31 AM