A Short History of Mozilla on Windows Mobile

I thought it might be nice to reflect on my involvement in porting the Mozilla to Windows Mobile.

In 2004 we had a project called Minimo — it was meant as a lighter weight build-time configuration of Mozilla for GTK. To showcase the build options, we had an application called TestGtkEmbed that developers could use to test against benchmarks, etc. As the name implies, it was just a testing application — it didn’t have browser features like bookmarks, session history, preference management, etc.

At the end of 2004, I was hired by the Mozilla Foundation working for Chris Hofmann, who was the director of engineering. I started on porting this set of build options to Windows Mobile. At this point, there was no real desire to build an application — I was happy to just continue building a browser engine that could be part of another application.

I really had no desire to do Windows Mobile development. However, at the time, it was really the only devices available that people could by off the street and run very large applications on (think: a modern web browser). The idea was that you could do direct-to-consumer development.

We found that there was some work done by Garrett Blythe (i don’t have a better link, sorry) at Netscape in 2002 which we could leverage — there was a partial patch to NSPR for windows mobile. Garrett was responsible for an effort to port Netscape to Windows CE. His basic approach to porting from Win32 -> WinCE is is what I continued using (and we still use most of it today).

At the beginning of 2005, Brad Lassey started helping and around March 2005 we had much of the platform ported over. Below is the picture of the first time mozilla rendered google windows mobile phone:

If you want to see other pictures, check out rebron’s posts from way back when.

At some point, we needed to branch away from using WinEmbed (basically the same thing as TestGtkEmbed i mentioned above, but for windows) and decided it was a good idea to build a UI for Minimo on Windows Mobile that end users could use. Looking at something we might be able to share between the linux/gtk version of Minimo and Window Mobile, we decided to write the UI in XUL. The size/space measurement for using XUL were very small compared to the flexibility you got (we were thinking extensions).

Working from Brazil, Marcio Galli was basically responsible for the front end. We experimented with a bunch of things like social bookmarking, geolocation, device API, and widgets. We learned alot, and some of this ended up being the basis for a draft spec.

In April 2006, I stopped working on Minimo full time and started other mobile work for Mozilla. The Minimo project continued. I tried to work fix the occasional bug, but development basically ended.

At the end of 2007, I blogged about the end of Minimo (the windows mobile mozilla browser) and a new effort called Fennec. Our team now is much larger than the original effort; we have people in QA, Press, IT, UX, Marketing all thinking about Mobile.

Now, we have our first public milestone release. A completely new font backend, cairo support, extension support, and basically everything that Firefox has.

Today is the rebirth of this browser: Better, stronger, faster. We have a way to go before we declare a “1.0″ release, but hope you come with us and participate in open source, mozilla, and Fennec – our mobile browser.