Does anyone have any information on when mozilla fennec is going to be released for the storm? The default browser isnr very great and i'm not crazy about the opera mini browswer either.
thanks
ahh sorry i didnt realize that the title made it sound like that sorry..
Well, since someone bumped this ancient thread... Let's just clear this up by saying that there will NEVER be a Fennec release for the Blackberry. Just like there will likely NEVER be a release for the Jesus Phone either.
Do a SEARCH for additional details... But the very short version is that the amount of effort it would take to port Fennic to the BB platform would be astronomical, and maintaining it would be equally daunting.
Well, since someone bumped this ancient thread... Let's just clear this up by saying that there will NEVER be a Fennec release for the Blackberry. Just like there will likely NEVER be a release for the Jesus Phone either.
Do a SEARCH for additional details... But the very short version is that the amount of effort it would take to port Fennic to the BB platform would be astronomical, and maintaining it would be equally daunting.
Yes, it probably would take a lot of work, but it's not as though Mozilla is comprised of ONE person. It's an entire company, and a huge one at that, with lots of money. They have the resources to create and maintain a mobile web browser.
The Fennec beta is only available for the Nokia 810 Internet Tablet, but there are emulators for Windows, Mac OS X, and Linux. Mozilla is still planning to release a full version for Windows Mobile and Symbian by the end of the year. Fennec initially won't be available for BlackBerry, Android, or iPhone users because of licensing or technical reasons.
I even came to this post looking for a OTA link and I don't even have a storm. Just thought if it came out for the storm then the rest of us wouldn't be far behind.
Please Mozilla, make a version for the Storm! God knows RIM is not going to give us a decent touch browser, cause lets be honest here, they don't really care about us storm owners (and I'm not even sure they could make a decent browser, even if they wanted to).
Yes, it probably would take a lot of work, but it's not as though Mozilla is comprised of ONE person. It's an entire company, and a huge one at that, with lots of money. They have the resources to create and maintain a mobile web browser.
It would probably be a full time job for a team of at least 20 programmers. Assuming an average annual salary of $50,000US per programmer... That's a lot of money. Add onto that the fact that about 60% of Mozilla's revenues come from Google, which now has it's own browser in Chrome. So, Mozilla may well see a significant drop in its operating budget in a couple of years when the contract with Google is up for renewal.
Trying to port the Gecko engine to the BB platform would be like taking a 100,000 page technical manual, written in French, and translating it into Italian. Only there are a lot of words that have no direct translation, and the contents of the book are always changing.
Even if you could write a program to do the bulk of the translation work for you, you have to have someone to go through the generated output and do some basic sanity checking on it. So it might cut out a lot of the grunt work, but it still leaves a lot of the mind numbing tedium.
But you don't have to take my word for it... Go find any programmer you want, and ask them how easy it would be to port even a drastically stripped down version of Firefox to Java. And then not only port it, but keep up with future developments. I'd bet a good amount of money you'll get either incredulous stares like, "I can't believe you would ask me such a stupid question," or they just burst out laughing thinking it's a joke.
Just thought if it came out for the storm then the rest of us wouldn't be far behind.