A few days ago, before I wrote these 2 posts, I read a story over on PalmAddicts about an online petition. The petition was in regards to making the Netfront web browser available for PalmOS. At the time, all I knew about the Netfront browser was that it was created by the company that recently bought PalmSource (the software side of the Palm universe). Being pretty happy with the default web browser "Blazer", and realizing that these online petitions usually don't result in much, I ignored it.
This past Tuesday I was playing around with TCPMP and noticed that it was reporting my heap size as being around 2MB. I'm not getting any errors when playing movies, in fact they display great. I had read that you could find heap size information in TCPMP's "about" menu selection so I thought I'd check it out; they probably include this information in order to track down why you could be getting errors. My problem with TCPMP reporting only 2MB is that this is only half of what it's supposed to be. Initially this led me to believe that one of the (many) pieces of software I've installed in the past few days had a bug in it... after reading around online for awhile, I saw that a lot of TX users were having this same problem; the culprit being Blazer.
It seems that on startup/reset, however you want to look at it, Blazer grabs the amount of memory that it wants and won't "share" it, even when it's not running (see the fourth comment of this post). A post over at Tam's Palm explain's some software that tries to correct this behavior.
Thankfully there is a way to get Netfront on the TX. Having just read about this now, I really want to try it out. Not only could it save me some memory, but it sounds like Netfront is a much better browser. Big preemptive thanks to Tam and Dmitry if I can get this to work.
UPDATE 2006-10-03: Getting Netfront on your Palm is a lot easier than I previously thought. Please see this post for details.