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.

Recently you have probably read that the Mozilla Corporation is building the embeddable version of Mozilla and a mobile Firefox. In the new and expanded mobile effort the project will create a standards-based open-source browser engine and full open source development stack based on Mozilla technology, optimized for mobile devices, and embeddable on a variety of device targets. This new work will replace the Minimo project.

If you are a developer using Minimo as the basis for your embedding needs, this new effort will help you. This is picking up where Minimo’s build configure left off, and further squeezing and optimizing Mozilla.

Although we haven’t committed to specific platforms, all of the effort that was focused on the Minimo front end will be refocused on this new project. This new browser product will take advantage of lessons learned in minimo UI prototyping and experimentation. It will also include support for XUL-based add-ons, and deliver on Firefox’s key principles of ease-of-use and accessibility.

We hope you can join the conversation. Most of the developers and interested people hang out on irc.mozilla.org #mobile. If you have questions, or need clarification, please drop by.

I just finished listening to latest Bill Moyers podcast (http://www.pbs.org/moyers/podcast.xml) on the way home from work. The quick summary is that the FCC is attempting to further loosen the ownership rules allowing big media companies to buy-up more properties. If this does go through, the result is more of what we see on TV, in print, and listen to on the radio will be in the hands of much fewer people.

What really stood out to me were the people (such as the folks producing shows for the WVON radio station) trying to make their own community a better place by providing programming over this controlled media. Their problem is that there isn’t really a business case that justifies this effort — there is no money to sustain such a production. Throughout this podcast, i keep thinking — why not use another media like a podcast, or videocast or something else that didn’t have the huge infrastructure costs. I suppose there is a cost on the consumer end which is a problem — more people have radios than ipods+computer… but that is changing. The point is that the small guy with a small audience can not compete with something that has dozens of times the marketing efforts, can afford the large infrastructure costs, and can leverage syndicated content across multiple channels. These smaller guys have to do something different to maintain a voice — they can’t and shouldn’t fight toe to toe if they don’t have to. This is where I see the importance of a level playing field level — the web.

So, lets just suppose that we take the FCC ownership to a final but unrealistic conclusion. Lets suppose that News Corp. (or another fair and balanced company) owned the tv stations, all of the major papers, and all of the radio stations in my area. Does it matter? It probably does. But what is perfectly clear is that having a Free and Open Web is critical not only to ensuring that there are different viewpoints, but critical to our very Democracy. The more big media owns, the more the Web must remain Open. Sadly, the current FCC proposal doesn’t touch Net Neutrality despite a clear connection between these two issues.

If you want to know about this legislation, check out the podcast or you can check out the fair and balanced website: http://www.stopbigmedia.com/.

this is interesting for two reasons –

the first if you have an iphone, running 1.1.1, and want to use 3rd party apps, just load this page, and your done — it does everything for you including installing Installer.app. Very cool.

the second reason this is of interest is that the method of getting 3rd party apps on the locked phone is simply loading an image file in the browser. The image exploits a hole in safari and allows the website to install software. I guess this is the first time that I actually appreciate this sort of thing.

http://joey.labs.mozilla.com/

Please use bugzilla or the lab forums for feedback.

Regards,

Doug Turner