Comments on: Firefox Summit Rundown

By: Comunidad argentina de Mozilla » Firefox Plus Summit 2008

Comunidad argentina de Mozilla » Firefox Plus Summit 2008 — Tue, 12 Aug 2008 14:38:27 +0000

[...] que pudimos viajar. Mientras tanto, puede leerse un resumen interesante (en inglés) en este blog. Pueden verse fotos del encuentro buscando la etiqueta moz08 en flickr (servicio social de [...]

By: Steve Lee

Steve Lee — Tue, 05 Aug 2008 08:11:44 +0000

Great summary thanks thanks Aaron

By: marcoos

marcoos — Mon, 04 Aug 2008 23:10:21 +0000

That’s corrext.

Fennec is the browser with a XUL-based UI (extensions!), like Firefox, and MicroB just embeds Gecko (with XUL support turned off at build time).

By: Smokey Ardisson

Smokey Ardisson — Mon, 04 Aug 2008 23:01:52 +0000

Once upon a time there was an effort to make a Mozilla contributors directory via some sort of mash-up site; I’m not sure what happened to it. I thought the mash-up site’s UI was pretty terrible, and I couldn’t figure out any way to create useful subsets of the data (i.e., people who worked on certain things), rather than just geographic/map-based relationships. Possibly good as a travel guide, but not so useful as a more comprehensive directory.

Ah, it was Frappr; here’s the post from Gerv about it: http://weblogs.mozillazine.org/gerv/archives/2005/12/put_yourself_on_frappr_1.html

By: Gen Kanai

Gen Kanai — Mon, 04 Aug 2008 22:50:17 +0000

Other people (timeless?) are much more familiar with the details of the differences between MicroB and Fennec, but I’m pretty sure that MicroB took out a bunch of support for some key technologies. Plus, they used I think the 1.9alpha2, so MicroB does not have all of the improvements that were made to 1.9 since that time (I assume they put some in but not all.) How they will differentiate in the future is something I think Nokia has to answer.

Ari Jaaksi, who runs the Maemo team at Nokia, has blogged about his desire to bring MicroB back to the mozilla-central trunk. I’ve transcribed some of Jaaksi’s comments from OSiM USA 2008 on my blog:

Question from the audience (@ 16:20): “Excuse me, another question. If I remember correctly, it was 3 years ago when you [Nokia] implemented Webkit in to the Series 60 devices, you had to make a lot changes, for example in memory management. Did you use the ‘upstream model’ in that case? I mean, did you feed back to the community the changes you had made for your devices?”

Answer from Ari Jaaksi: “Not the way we [Nokia] should have done it. Let me be very honest about that. Also with our Internet tablets we have horror stories where we didn’t do it [share patches back with the trunk]. Just today, or yesterday I discussed this with the Mozilla guy, the name escapes me at the moment [Jaaksi is referencing Jay Sullivan, Mozilla's VP of mobile], I don’t know if he is here today, about our Mozilla browser here. It is really that, what we did was last summer when we started to ship with the Mozilla browser we made a couple of mistakes. We are kind of working upstream there [with Mozilla] but we are not doing as much as I would like to do and we sort of need to go back. We almost forked the code [from Mozilla] but we need to go back [to sync up with the main Gecko 1.9 trunk].”

http://blog.mozilla.com/gen/2008/03/14/nokia-on-working-with-open-source/

Jaaksi also talks about these same goals in a broader brush on his own blog:

http://jaaksi.blogspot.com/2008/06/foundations-and-principles.html

By: aaronlev

aaronlev — Mon, 04 Aug 2008 22:34:54 +0000

Thanks Gen, that makes sense. What are MicroB and Fennec ultimately going to be differentiated by? If I understand correctly, it’s that Fennec comes with both XUL support and a browser UI driven by XUL. MicroB does not need XUL because its UI is based GTK, correct?

By: Gen Kanai

Gen Kanai — Mon, 04 Aug 2008 21:58:43 +0000

Hi Aaron, great overview. Just one clarification- Maemo is Nokia’s Linux distribution for the N7xx/N8xx series of devices. The browser on Maemo Linux is MicroB, an early 1.9 alpha of Gecko.