Minimo (from "Mini Mozilla") was a project to create a version of the

Mozilla Mozilla (stylized as moz://a) is a free software community founded in 1998 by members of Netscape. The Mozilla community uses, develops, spreads and supports Mozilla products, thereby promoting exclusively free software and open standards, w ...

web browser A web browser is application software for accessing websites. When a user requests a web page from a particular website, the browser retrieves its files from a web server and then displays the page on the user's screen. Browsers are used o ...

for small devices like

personal digital assistant A personal digital assistant (PDA), also known as a handheld PC, is a variety mobile device which functions as a personal information manager. PDAs have been mostly displaced by the widespread adoption of highly capable smartphones, in part ...

s and

mobile phone A mobile phone, cellular phone, cell phone, cellphone, handphone, hand phone or pocket phone, sometimes shortened to simply mobile, cell, or just phone, is a portable telephone that can make and receive calls over a radio frequency link whi ...

s. The project aimed to make it easier for developers to embed parts of Mozilla into systems with limited system resources (for example, machines with low amounts of

RAM Ram, ram, or RAM may refer to: Animals * A male sheep * Ram cichlid, a freshwater tropical fish People * Ram (given name) * Ram (surname) * Ram (director) (Ramsubramaniam), an Indian Tamil film director * RAM (musician) (born 1974), Dutch * ...

Background

The Minimo Project was created to test the feasibility of porting a full-function desktop browser engine to advanced mobile devices. To minimize the use of system resources Minimo initially did not include some of Mozilla's functionality, such as support for SVG, although continuing experiments sought to include all the features of the Mozilla codebase. In addition, the browser used

small screen rendering A mobile browser is a web browser designed for use on a mobile device such as a mobile phone or PDA. Mobile browsers are optimized to display Web content most effectively on small screens on portable devices. Mobile browser software must be smal ...

technology to reformat Web pages for pocket-sized displays and allowed a platform for UI experiments on mobile devices. The

user interface In the industrial design field of human–computer interaction, a user interface (UI) is the space where interactions between humans and machines occur. The goal of this interaction is to allow effective operation and control of the machine f ...

was designed to take up minimal screen space, with a single 8px high toolbar and a hidden-by-default address bar. Other user interface functionality, such as bookmarks, history, and search, was migrated into a special homepage called the Homebase. Because Minimo is based on the Gecko infrastructure, developers can decide to build specific versions and evaluate other features such as the canvas, SVG support, and more. Chris Hofmann created the Minimo project shortly after leaving Netscape Communications in 2003, under funding from Nokia's Maemo team. He single-handedly saved the project from being canceled many times. Currently Chris works for the

Mozilla Corporation The Mozilla Corporation (stylized as moz://a) is a wholly owned subsidiary of the Mozilla Foundation that coordinates and integrates the development of Internet-related applications such as the Firefox web browser, by a global community of ope ...

. Chris was also responsible for some of the Minimo key features such as the Homebase bar, a format for displaying bookmarks more amenable to mobile devices. Early Minimo development centered on

ARM In human anatomy, the arm refers to the upper limb in common usage, although academically the term specifically means the upper arm between the glenohumeral joint (shoulder joint) and the elbow joint. The distal part of the upper limb between th ...

devices (such as Hewlett-Packard's

iPAQ The iPAQ is a discontinued Pocket PC and personal digital assistant which was first unveiled by Compaq in April 2000. HP's line-up of iPAQ devices included PDA-devices, smartphones and GPS-navigators. A substantial number of devices were ...

) with around 64 MB of RAM, running

Familiar Linux Familiar Linux is a discontinued Linux distribution for iPAQ devices and other personal digital assistants (PDAs), intended as a replacement for Windows CE. It can use OPIE or GPE Palmtop Environment as the graphical user interface. Technical d ...

and the

GPE Palmtop Environment GPE (a recursive acronym for GPE Palmtop Environment) is a graphical user interface environment for handheld computers, such as palmtops and personal digital assistants (PDAs), running some Linux kernel-based operating system. GPE is a complete ...

(where it was the default browser). Minimo 0.1 was released for this platform in 2004. The lead Minimo developer,

Doug Turner Douglas William Turner (born January 3, 1969) is the founding partner of the global communications firm Agenda. He also was a Republican candidate for the New Mexico gubernatorial election in 2010, where he was defeated in the primary election ...

, headed this and additional Mozilla mobile projects such as the Mozilla labs project named Joey. The

Mozilla Foundation The Mozilla Foundation (stylized as moz://a) is an American non-profit organization that exists to support and collectively lead the open source Mozilla project. Founded in July 2003, the organization sets the policies that govern development, ...

hired Turner in December 2004 to work full-time on Mobile projects. Minimo was funded by

Nokia Nokia Corporation (natively Nokia Oyj, referred to as Nokia) is a Finnish multinational telecommunications, information technology, and consumer electronics corporation, established in 1865. Nokia's main headquarters are in Espoo, Finland, i ...

and others. Nokia's involvement became public in mid-2004. Chris and Doug teamed up with web developer Marcio Galli as he focused in user interface aspects and mostly creating built in applications for Minimo using HTML instead of

XUL XUL ( ), which stands for XML User Interface Language, is a user interface markup language developed by Mozilla. XUL is an XML dialect for writing graphical user interfaces, enabling developers to write user interface elements in a manner sim ...

— these were refereed in the source code as extensions but served as concept for web-based mobile apps featuring Flickr, Google Maps, and more. A

Windows CE Windows Embedded Compact, formerly Windows Embedded CE, Windows Powered and Windows CE, is an operating system subfamily developed by Microsoft as part of its Windows Embedded family of products. Unlike Windows Embedded Standard, which is base ...

version of Minimo was created for Pocket PC 2003

software development kit A software development kit (SDK) is a collection of software development tools in one installable package. They facilitate the creation of applications by having a compiler, debugger and sometimes a software framework. They are normally specific ...

. The first public build of Minimo for Windows CE was made available in February 2005. In June 2006, the 0.16 release of minimo included tabs, a "homebase bar" for fast navigation to frequently used web sites, and featured support for many advanced web development capabilities that made the mobile browser easier to use. On December 17, 2006, Turner, in his

blog A blog (a truncation of "weblog") is a discussion or informational website published on the World Wide Web consisting of discrete, often informal diary-style text entries (posts). Posts are typically displayed in reverse chronological order s ...

, acknowledged the slow pace of development, and revealed that Mozilla developers were exploring alternatives for Gecko-based web browsing on mobile handsets. Turner issued an invitation for others to "step up" as his own development priorities shift.MozillaZine
/ref> Version 0.2 came out in March 2007 and represented a product targeted for mobile developers. Minimo 0.2 included and upgraded interface, and support for Windows Mobile 5. On November 27, 2007, project head Doug Turner announced that the project was no longer supported. By 2008 Doug Turner had begun on yet another mobile web browser, this time known as

Firefox Mozilla Firefox, or simply Firefox, is a free and open-source web browser developed by the Mozilla Foundation and its subsidiary, the Mozilla Corporation. It uses the Gecko rendering engine to display web pages, which implements current ...

Mobile or Fennec.

Criticism

Probably because it was in the early stages of development, the

Windows Mobile Windows Mobile is a discontinued family of mobile operating systems developed by Microsoft for smartphones and personal digital assistants. Its origin dated back to Windows CE in 1996, though Windows Mobile itself first appeared in 2000 as Pock ...

version of Minimo performed significantly slower than expected. The quality of rendered pages is congruent with the well-respected layout engine it implemented ( Gecko), but the program had very high memory and hardware requirements compared to what was typically available on most handheld platforms (e.g. 64 megabytes of

, 206–624 MHz ARM-compatible CPU). Version 0.2 was recommended for developers targeting mobile devices or interested in

AJAX Ajax may refer to: Greek mythology and tragedy * Ajax the Great, a Greek mythological hero, son of King Telamon and Periboea * Ajax the Lesser, a Greek mythological hero, son of Oileus, the king of Locris * ''Ajax'' (play), by the ancient Gree ...

- and Web Services-driven Web application for the mobile space. Minimo was compatible with many Web 2.0 applications, such as

Gmail Gmail is a free email service provided by Google. As of 2019, it had 1.5 billion active users worldwide. A user typically accesses Gmail in a web browser or the official mobile app. Google also supports the use of email clients via the POP and ...

References

External links

Minimo Project homepage
* ttps://web.archive.org/web/20060216103901/http://www.nmcx.com/story.php?news_id=3761 Interview with Doug Turner and Chris Hofmann of the Minimo Projectbr>Photos of Minimo running on Windows Mobile devices

* ttps://web.archive.org/web/20100109113437/http://weblogs.mozillazine.org/chofmann/archives/2006/06/ajax_mobile_map.html AJAX Mobile Apps {{Web browsers, mobile Gopher clients Mozilla Windows web browsers POSIX web browsers Free web browsers Embedded Linux Mobile web browsers Pocket PC software Discontinued web browsers

Background

Criticism

See also

References

External links