The Mozilla foundation recently managed to hire Palm’s Ben Combee, who is an absolute expert on all things related to mobile. One of the first eekers he tackled was a memory allocation problem which caused the last version of Fennec to render checkerboards instead of web sites on most handhelds:
Simply put, we were running out of memory. The frustrating part though, was that we weren’t running out of real memory. We were being constrained by an artificial limit of 32Mb (including the binary) that Windows CE places on each process. That is why otherwise extremely capable phones like the HTC Touch Pro with 288Mb of RAM were showing a beautiful checkerboard pattern. I’m still not entirely sure why this didn’t show up on our development devices before the release. I suspect it has something to do with the fact that we’re using unlocked HTC Touch Pros for development, while most of the testers seeing the problem were using handsets from Sprint, Verzion or AT&T.
Digging further, the reason people saw a checkerboard pattern, but otherwise usable UI is due in part to the way Fennec works. In Fennec, the user actually interacts with an html canvas element. We render the page off screen and then paint the image onto the canvas. In this particular case, it seems as though we were successfully rendering pages but failing to allocate enough memory to do the final paint onto Fennec’s canvas. We were handling this low memory “gracefully” and continuing to run.
Further information can be had here:
http://blog.mozilla.com/blassey/2009/03/23/memory-dragon-slain/
P.S. No new release has been made available as of this writing…
Related posts:
Just a note — that post you quote is by my fellow Fennec hacker Brad Lassey, not me. I helped a little with the diagnosis, but he and the other Windows Mobile developers really tracked down the problem. We’re really close to an alpha release on WinMo; look for it soon.
Hi Ben,
thank you so much for talking back – please keep me posted!
All the best
Tam Hanna