Minimo

» see mozilla.org/projects/minimo as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obit ~

Minimo wanted sixty four megabytes of ram and an ARM chip running somewhere between 206 and 624 megahertz. In 2005 that described a Pocket PC, and a Pocket PC in turkey was a thing you read a review of rather than a thing anybody had in a pocket. The mobile web I actually had in those years was WAP over GPRS, billed by the kilobyte and rendered at whatever size the carrier had decided on.

The name is short for Mini Mozilla and it contains the whole plan. Rather than write a new engine for small screens, Mozilla would take Gecko, which already rendered the desktop web correctly, and squeeze it down until it fit. Chris Hofmann started the project shortly after leaving Netscape in 2003 with funding from Nokia's Maemo group. Doug Turner became the lead developer, and Mozilla hired him full time in december 2004 to work on mobile.

The interface was the interesting part. Screen space on a 2005 handheld was the scarcest resource in the building, so Minimo gave its toolbar eight pixels of height and hid the address bar by default. Bookmarks and history moved off the browser chrome entirely and onto a special start page called the Homebase. Marcio Galli built the bundled applications in HTML instead of XUL, including a Flickr client and a Google Maps front end, which in 2006 was an early sketch of what a mobile web app would eventually be.

Early builds targeted ARM handhelds like HP's iPAQ running Familiar Linux, where Minimo shipped as the default browser of the GPE palmtop environment. Version 0.1 came out in 2004. The first public Windows CE build followed in february 2005, and 0.16 in june 2006 finally added tabs.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ the cracks ~

It was slow. Not slow the way early software is usually slow, but slow the way a desktop layout engine is when you hand it a 300 megahertz processor and ask it to reflow a page written for a 1024 pixel window. The rendering was correct because Gecko was correct, and that correctness was exactly what the memory went on. Reviewers of the Windows Mobile builds kept reaching for the same word, which was unusable.

Turner posted on 17 december 2006 that development was moving slowly and that Mozilla was looking at other approaches to Gecko on handsets. He invited anyone who wanted to step up to do so. Nobody did in any way that mattered. Version 0.2 arrived in march 2007 with Windows Mobile 5 support and was pitched at developers building mobile web applications rather than at people who wanted a browser, which is what a project sounds like once it has stopped believing it will ship to the public.

~ what it became ~

On 27 november 2007 Turner announced that Minimo was no longer supported. Within months he was working on the browser that became Fennec and then Firefox for Android, built on the same engine with almost none of the same assumptions. The difference was hardware. The iPhone had shipped in june 2007 and the first Android handset would follow in september 2008, and both carried an order of magnitude more memory than the iPAQ that Minimo had spent four years fighting.

So it lost to the calendar rather than to a rival. Every argument Minimo made about running a real engine on a phone turned out to be right, and it made them roughly three years before any phone could hear them. The Homebase, which put your bookmarks on the start page because there was nowhere else in eight pixels to put them, is now more or less how every mobile browser opens a new tab.

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