Tags: Apple

Opera vs. Mozilla Minimo Project

Looks like Firefox is causing a hallucinating effect on most of the tech writers around the world. They consider it the best thing to happen since sliced bread. Not a big deal considering it is a real good product, but a recent article on CNet News.com gave way too much credit to the Mozilla Foundation on their underdevelopment Minimo project. The fact remains that they are doing little new when compared to what Opera has already accomplished.

Let us see what the article says…

Minimo developers have already found a solution to the problem of rendering Web pages on small devices. This feature was included in both version 0.1 and 0.2 of Minimo. Turner said this solution is already better than some products on the market.

The technology works by shrinking less-important images, such as banner ads, and wrapping columns around to make a single column, so users only need to scroll vertically.

Ooh… Opera Small Screen Rendering mode is all about this and more. It reformats the webpage to fit in a smaller browser screen. They have enhanced it even more with integration with Medium Screen Rendering. The result is ERA (Extensible Rendering Architecture) which is now even accessible from their latest preview release desktop browsers. The browser-rendering engine is now capable to fit a webpage to any screen width making it accessible from any sized portable device.

“A lot of browsers ignore frames or have limited JavaScript support–they do terrible jobs,” he said. “With Minimo, if it renders OK in Firefox, it will render OK in Minimo.”

Again, they are completely ignoring Opera. Opera uses same engine for all their browser versions. If the page works fine in Opera for Desktop, it would work the same in Opera for Windows Mobile. And Opera for Desktop of course has excellent support for JavaScript and frames.

Minimo 0.3, due in January, will include improved Web page navigation for mobile phone users, Turner said. At present, phone users need to linearly tab through every link on the page to get to the right link, but the new technology will let people move between links on the Web page using the arrow keys.

“We have the proof of concept working right,” Turner said. “The hard part is working out where the next closest link is–it is a hard math or computer-science problem. You need fuzzy logic.”

Strangely, it is called Spatial Navigation in Opera Browser, which is working fine in all the browser versions since ages. I find it one of the coolest features of Opera Browser as it let me surf easily when my mouse is recharging. Firefox’s Caret Browsing feature somewhat comes close.

Developers also are working on a feature that would let people zoom in and out of Web pages, so they could easily find what they were looking for, Turner said. “If you go to the Web on a little screen, you don’t have any idea of where everything is,” he said. “For example, on a phone the ‘Contact’ link can be hard to find. If you could back out of the page it would be easier.”

Opera has excellent zooming capabilities since ages. Unlike most other browsers, which only manage to increase the text size in a webpage, Opera does real zoom in and zoom out. On the desktop version images, Flash and even Java Applets are zoomed to fit perfectly in an enlarged version of the webpage.

Another advantage of Minimo is that it is fully standards compliant and is compatible with various platforms.

Opera for Mobiles and PDAs is as standard compliant as it is for Desktop versions. And it comes out for far more platforms than Mozilla does currently.

“We can be ported to many platforms that Opera can’t,” he said. “Mozilla has been developed to work on every flavor of Unix and every type of processor, chip, or widget set.”

Maybe they should develop the browser (and support) for these platforms first before making claims about the competitor’s capabilities. We have not seen any major mobile market player coming out supporting Minimo yet though they plan to make an announcement soon.

Mobile market is quite different from Desktops with critical elements being Disk Space and Memory requirement. Firefox is bulky with half the features on desktop when compared to Opera. Mobile Market would be a real challenge for Mozilla Developers.

The basic problem is that CNet News makes it look like Mozilla is doing something that does not already exist. I think it is great that Mozilla Foundation is targeting Mobile market next. In fact, competition for Opera would make the company work harder on their products. However, to simply ignore the basic facts while making assumptions and misleading the public is something that does not suit either Mozilla Foundation or CNet.