Hmmm...
Can you say Chromium Mobile?
The Firefox 4 Android beta is morbidly obese. But Mozilla has a diet plan. Over the past twelve hours, after Mozilla released its first Firefox 4 beta for Android, multiple Reg readers have said the browser takes up far too much space on their Googly phones. "Fooking HUGE!!!" said one. "Not even going to waste my time with the …
It also doesn't really do a lot of rendering itself; a large amount of it is rendered and compressed by Opera's servers first before it goes anywhere near your handset.
Firefox Mobile, on the other hand, includes a full rendering engine and also all the supporting libraries. The size difference is to be expected.
Why on earth did Google do that? One of the key points about the ARM processor is that its code density (i.e. functionality per kByte of storage) is unusually high. There's not really a great need to compress the code at all. And if the rest of an app's APK is pictures, well jpgs are already compressed too.
.. are not ARM code by and large. They are not even exclusively 100% Dalvik for there are application 'resources' within too. For a phone which by default (up to 2.1) has to load APK's into its primary storage device, you can see why google chose to compress these.
I agree, having the image avalaible uncompressed in another place (I do not know enough if this is actually in a working directory or a ramdisk/cache) sounds wasteful but it may have been done to improve responsiveness. Presumably google phases these loads to recycle out as the application fades out of context. I am assuming a lot - I do not know all the nitty gritty yet.
2.1 and below, Dalvik's just an interpreter. And 2.2 - I don't know exactly how good the Jitter is compared to oracle/suns.
I must say I was pretty dead set against managed code and virtual machines, but my preliminary muckings with Android and Java have made me have second thoughts. No firm verdicts, I still think c is king but all I can say is "hmm, interesting".
My phone has been running without reboot now 3 weeks despite the crap I send it to test.
Because Linux can only dynamically load executables and libraries out of the real filesystem, not from zipfiles. Therefore the library has to be copied out of the apk (which is just a renamed zipfile) into the filesystem before it can be used. But the apk can't be modified, so you end up with a compressed copy there as well.
The solution to this is to use something like FUSE to allow the zipfile to be mounted as a real filesystem, but that makes life much more complicated (and slower) and as it would only really be useful for this particular case they've decided not to do it.
I have it on my galaxy s, it crashes a lot, hardly loads any pages and takes about 2 minutes to start.
The built in androis browser is superior in every way at the moment. I really hope that they get it working properly but this is not even of alpha quality at the moment
Big whoop its 40mb, use a2sd+ from day one and you will have loads of space. I personally don't need hundreds of apps installed at once. If I want an app as a one off I download it use it and then uninstall it.
As for the comment about windows memory leak I'm betting you use flash. Flash doesn't tell Firefox its done with the memory when its finished. Most memory leaks couuld be fixed if they made flash report to the browser that its done.
I for one will be trying this and hopefully the pages that chrome doesn't work well with will be better.
Even 20Mb app (usually 3D games) is considered huge, and many would not even touch those. One major complaint for flash on mobile is its size (and cannot be moved to SD). Flash is around 10mb. I thought wasting over 10mb for flash is already insane. 40Mb for a bloody browser, have they completely lost their mind?