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Our Blogs The Linux distillery Firefox 3, the Guinness Book of Records, and mobile phones
Our Blogs The Linux distillery Firefox 3, the Guinness Book of Records, and mobile phones | Firefox 3, the Guinness Book of Records, and mobile phones |
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| by David M Williams | |
| Sunday, 15 June 2008 | |
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Page 3 of 3 Mobile phone users have long had the problems of enjoying a satisfactory web browsing experience on the go, subject to the constraints of a small screen and input methods, and limited memory and processing capability.Featured Whitepaper
5 Best Practices for Smartphone Support
So, the best thing is to have a regular web browser on your handheld which doesn’t require any burden on web site developers to do things specially different, but yet renders the page correctly while at the same time allowing users to pan around a larger page on a smaller screen and does so with a minimum of delay and processing power. Sound reasonable? The developers of Opera thought so; the Opera web browser is a tiny program but yet offers excellent web browsing capabilities. Although it comes in desktop form its small footprint makes it ideal for handhelds. And, it’s not really had much serious competition in that space. With Firefox 3 almost under their belts, Mozilla are looking towards a mobile version too. At this stage it is purely conceptual but a video has been produced by Aza Raskin, the head of user experience for Mozilla Labs. It was posted on Vimeo.Com four days ago and visually describes some of the design ideas being canvassed better than words can. Check it out here. I, for one, soundly applaud the idea of a mobile Firefox. And, as much as I love Opera, I’m begging Mozilla to work out how to start it up in a flash. I’ve made my first ever YouTube video for this story (and as an aside, how many people use YouTube? davidmwilliams wasn’t an available username, nor dmw, nor qwerty nor sdfsdf; eventually I discovered kedkdskdk was unused so that’s my YouTube name now!) which shows the vast difference in startup times of the built-in BlackBerry Browser and the latest Opera 4.1 for mobiles web browser, on my BlackBerry 8800. Yes, that’s my thumb, and yes, I did put on an iPhone theme! Notice that the BlackBerry Browser starts in a flash, but Opera takes 10 full seconds. That’s crazy and a major disincentive to using it. See it here! So that’s Firefox 3 – it’s coming out, it’s going for a record, it’s got lots of great stuff, it’s coming to a mobile phone near you. Now the only thing left to do is persuade Alex Zaharov-Reutt to let us host a Firefox party at his house. |
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