New Mobile Computing (NMC) has published an interview with Doug Turner and Chris Hofmann, leaders of the Minimo project, discussing the motivations, goals, and status of the effort to create an embeddable Web browser for Linux devices based on Mozilla's “gecko” rendering engine.

According to the founders, as quoted by NMC, the Minimo project has completed much of the “footprint” work, which involved pulling a minimalistic codebase from the main Mozilla tree. User interface customizations for small devices remain to be done.

Minimo targets devices with 32MB to 64MB of RAM, which the founders say is really the minimum threshhold for any modern browser, as quoted by NMC. Minimo depends upon GTK, and releases target the Familiar distribution (mainly for iPAQs), and the GPE palmtop environment, according to the interview.

The Minino leaders say small screen rendering (SSR) advances have been made, but that SSR can never completely make up for poor Web site design, according to the inteview. The leaders also say they believe that future cell phones will share many features with high-end PDAs.

Additional topics include the challenge of supporting multiple platforms, the coming mobile device browser wars, support for offline browsing, commercial involvement in the Minimo project, and the chances of adding WAP support.

Read interview with Minimo leaders at New Mobile Computing

 
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