Hi, ext John Holmblad wrote: > All, > > for those who have not already seen the article whose url is: > > > http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20080409-first-look-mozilla-fennec-targets-handheld-browser-market.html > > It provides a comparison of the performance of Microb versus Fennec on > the N810. Fennec shows a ~6x speed improvement for javascript. Yes, the numbers of these automated tests are right. However, users having used both browsers will probably agree that in terms of real user experience as for today both are pretty similar, and even the Nokia version is performing better in real use conditions. I'm talking about my own experience and comments I've heard. What is your opinion? I'm sure both Nokia and Mozilla developers are interested to know. Is someone lying? Not at all. It's just a matter of looking at the details. The current MicroB engine was developed one year ago by Nokia starting with a pre-alpha of the latest Gecko engine, the freshest code available by then. The release under development done last Summer put a Mozilla based browser at a level where nobody could before (including the own Mozilla guys, who were happily surprised btw). Now Fennec is shipping a most recent Gecko and of course putting both one by side you get nowadays much better performance at engine level. How much MicroB's open source code helped on that, I don't know but I guess it saved them some work. But users don't deal with engines alone, you have the UI in between and this is where the Mozilla browser in Chinook and Fennec differ most: the first uses an own UI providing -as for today- much better performance that XUL, a component that seems like needing more work before being really fit in mobile devices. Are we going to keep this difference in the future? Time we tell. Both teams have a lot of work to do anyway. But in fact the best part of this Mozilla browsers comparison is not the numbers competition part but the human collaboration part. The Mozilla and Nokia developers are collaborating and both projects are in sync. The current development of the Mozilla browser for Diablo+1 is based directly on the Gecko trunk and we are discussing ways of deepening the collaboration, also at a community level. Imagine the wide community of Firefox add-on developers targeting the maemo platform - that would be fun. We are even having some common exercises of exploration, both sides learning a lot i.e. Qt support - http://blog.vlad1.com/2008/05/06/well-isnt-that-qt/ Conclusion: We are as happy as you seeing the performance progress done by the Fennec project. We feel honored by them targeting our platform in the first place. Nokia is doing the right thing with the Mozilla development. Lots of potential for collaboration and cool stuff. -- Quim Gil marketing manager, open source maemo software @ Nokia _______________________________________________ maemo-users mailing list maemo-users@xxxxxxxxx https://lists.maemo.org/mailman/listinfo/maemo-users
