Commentary

Richard Martin
 

DEMO Update: Skyfire Debuts New Mobile Browser

With all the transformation occurring in the mobile and wireless market -- with powerful new devices and established mobile browsers jostling for users' attention -- it's an interesting time for a new mobile browser to appear. That's what happened today at Demo.

With all the transformation occurring in the mobile and wireless market -- with powerful new devices and established mobile browsers jostling for users' attention -- it's an interesting time for a new mobile browser to appear. That's what happened today at Demo.Mountain View, Calif.-based Skyfire launched the private beta of its new mobile browser this morning with a compelling demonstration that compared the performance of the Skyfire browser with the mobile version of Internet Explorer (on a Windows Mobile device), with Opera Mini (on a N95), and with the iPhone from Apple. To say that those systems didn't stack up is an understatement; you never know to what degree such demos are rigged, but assuming this was a straight-up comparison it was quite convincing: while the Skyfire browser displayed a photo slideshow from the wedding of a friend of CEO Nitin Bhandari, the other devices either failed to load the Web page or just displayed a "black screen of death."

"Now you can get the full PC Web on your phone," said Bhandari. "Every site, every application, and every video."


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Skyfire accomplishes this, CTO Erik Swenson told me afterward, through a client-server architecture that uses a proprietary, patent-pending protocol to "crunch the data" (essentially, compress the HTML into a form that makes it easier to send and display, without losing any of the richness of the content).

"What RIM does for mobile e-mail, we do for the Web," Swenson explained.

As smartphones become more Web-enabled, I'm not sure of the long-term potential for the Skyfire browser. But it'll be interesting to see how the carriers react to a program that gives people instant access, over virtually any device, to the full riches of the Web.


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