Wii Firefox?

For some reason, I'm much more comfortable using firefox than using any other applications.
Would a firefox port for the wii be possible?

Opera makes me "nervous," like a person who's chewing nicotine gum instead of smoking.

Firefox is open source. So it should be possible. Good idea.

you do NOT know how many times I have suggested this. Still, it IS a good idea and I can't believe how much people are putting it down! I mean, this is an OPEN SOURCE program we're talking about porting! You *should* just need to replace the of the libraries, maybe #include a few different files, replace Direct X with libwiisprite GX and viola! Ofcourse, this is the guy who can't even get his C++ programs to compile, so, yeah.

Quote
strongfan
you do NOT know how many times I have suggested this. Still, it IS a good idea and I can't believe how much people are putting it down! I mean, this is an OPEN SOURCE program we're talking about porting! You *should* just need to replace the of the libraries, maybe #include a few different files, replace Direct X with libwiisprite GX and viola! Ofcourse, this is the guy who can't even get his C++ programs to compile, so, yeah.

Oh come on, please, if you don't know what you're talking about, don't say anything at all! To begin with, why in the hell would Firefox use DirectX? That's insanely ridiculous, especially for a cross platform browser. Besides those libraries you would just magically replace have to be ported too. Firefox is relying on the OS for a lot of things that you would have to implement that would normally be handled by Linux, OS X, Windows, etc. I'm sure there are browsers which are capable of running in an embedded environment which might be worthy of being ported, but I very much doubt that Firefox is one of them.



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 09/26/2008 10:24PM by caddr.

Does an embedded Firefox exist? A "mini" Firefox. A small browser based on the same architecture?
Something opensource?

There was a modified version called Portable Firefox for use on USB pen drives, don't know if they compacted it though

It is a version of Firefox for Windows, which doesn't use the registry or document-folders for settings, everything is saved inside a folder on youre stick. It has nothing to do with portability in the sense of multiplatform.

Question is:
Is a portal possible?

Quote
Paradox
Is a portal possible?

A what?

port..

Does the Wii have enough memory to run Firefox? >_>

Firefox is a pretty bad memory hog which isn't going to run well on the Wii.

You're better off trying to port WebKit.

Anything other than the internet channel is fine with me!

Just PLEASE someone port firefox. I don't care how easy it is to do, even if you have to rewrite one quarter of the programming code to make it Wii compatible. Just someone PLEASE do it.



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 10/05/2008 04:53AM by Videogamer.

Quote
Videogamer
Just PLEASE someone port firefox. I don't care how easy it is to do, even if you have to rewrite one quarter of the programming code to make it Wii compatible. Just someone PLEASE do it.

You seem so willing to volunteer others to do something for you regardless of how difficult it is. Why Firefox? People have mentioned reasons that it would not feasible to port Firefox (eg: its a huge application that has been developed by many people for years designed to run in a fully functional OS), but you didn't really motivate your absolute need for it. I know it seems easy when you just did half the work suggesting, but these things aren't trivial.

I'm SOOOOOO used to using Firefox on my computer, that ANY other web browser would seem "foreign" to me.

What people are forgetting and has been covered numerous times before is that firefox has been designed to run on operating systems that already have libraries and api's for access to graphics display, mouse/keyboard interaction, file system and network access, etc.. In the grand scheme of things, the Fx developers have relatively little to code since most of the mission critical stuff is available in the OS and can be called with a few lines of code per lib.

This is where a 'simple port' would not be possible for the Wii. You have to either find the libraries and api's you need to make it function or, as it is in the current state of the homebrew community, develop it all from scratch yourself. And that is on top of rewriting it all to work with the Wii's hardware. Have to use the wiimote pointer instead of a mouse, develop an OSK to not alienate users without usb keyboards, rewrite the network access to work with the Wii's methods, and completely redo the rendering system from the ground up to be visually pleasant on a television screen.

On top of all the technicalities, you have to make sure it all fits and runs SAFELY in the limited confines of the Wii's ram which would require LOADS of optimizations in Mozilla's codebase and probably calls for removing a number of functions to make it happen. In addition, the limited RAM requirement would most certainly negate extension/addon functionality as each is really hard to guage on resource usage and the more you add, the more it compounds.

And forget about classic 'plugins' like Adobe Flash, Sun Java, Shockwave, Quicktime, etal. The only way you can even remotely think about getting any of those added is to have the source code available to custom compile it for the Wii's ARM processor AND the browser. And even if you had the source code, you come back to resource usage being a concern.

Believe me when I say that I'd love to see a new browser for the Wii just as bad as anyone else here. But please do not come off like you will absolutely die without it especially if you have no clue what work would have to go into such a project. Fact is, if even the most experienced/seasoned developers here haven't taken on such a project, I think that would give a good idea on how complex such a project would be.

Those who aren't developers who keep clamoring for this over and over: Go learn some C/C++, download the homebrew devkit, and play around with it and try it for yourself. No one else is stopping you from doing it on your own. On the flipside, no one is getting paid to do any of this and most of the developers do this just out of a personal need for certain applications and DO NOT TAKE REQUESTS.

Is Opera open source? If it is, perhaps their Wii browser may help someone get started.

It appears that it isn't. That makes me wonder how Nintendo got it. Maybe we could port another Open Source browser! Perhaps... google chrome? If not, then we could write our own web browser! The first thing that we would need to do is t make an HTML interpreter or use Webkit. Then all we need to do is to use an internet lib to request a page from a server so that we can display it, and that's it! A simple browser! Right now, ANYTHING'S better than the Internet Channel!

I don't know what you guys have against Opera/Internet Channel. I think that it works really well, and I'll be impressed to see another browser work as well on the Wii

Anyway, while the comments about the size of Firefox etc... Mozilla did make a version than ran on PDAs, which therefore has a small code footprint.

[en.wikipedia.org]

Might help with your quest