Minefield on the N800
11.27.07 - 09:49am
Nokia released a Beta version of OS2008 for the N800 yesterday. This is of particular interest to the Mozilla community because of the pango and cairo support it brings to the device. Using this support, one can follow the build instructions found here and get a working build of Minefield that will run on your device.
It is very important to note that this is not Mobile Firefox. Its pretty stable for ‘normal’ use but I was able to crash it by opening a bunch of google maps tabs. (failed alloc not handled properly). Also, text input is broken; I’m sure it won’t be a problem with the hardware keyboard on the N810, but right now focusing on the address bar or a text box doesn’t bring up the soft keyboard.
What this is, in my opinion, is a very nice starting point. This binary has all the capabilities of desktop Firefox, including support for XUL and SVG, so it can be an excellent platform to experiment with different UI concepts for mobile (both the browser UI and web pages targeting mobile users). We are also working on tools to develop and test mobile UI’s on your desktop, but more on that later.
We have a lot of work to do on stability, usability, performance and getting the “right” mix of features. For now though, if you have an n800 or n810, I encourage you to pull and build the source an then tell us what you think. Hopefully we’ll have nightlies available shortly to cut out the pull and build steps.
I’ve playing a lot with minimo on n770 and n800 … xul runs great on the device …
what is going on on this ? I’d love to help