Skyfire Browser: The Future of Mobile Internet

Have you heard about Skyfire browser? I surely did not know until today. Suddenly, I saw that many websites have covered news items about Skyfire Browser.

To be honest with you, I never want to browse in my mobile phone set because I am not happy with the time and effort that I have to give and then not getting any satisfaction out of browsing the Internet. Well, I have to admit that I have a cheap mobile phone set and may be things would have been better if I had a more expansive mobile phone set. So, when I searched in Internet, I found that many people share my frustration and perhaps Skyfire browser can make some difference in their mobile browsing experience. I was surprised to see that many people were interested about Skyfire browser in Google Hot Trends.

What is even more interesting perhaps is the fact that Wikipedia has not made an entry about it. Well, Engadget was quick to respond to popular demand with this news: Skyfire browser for Windows Mobile is game changing, does Flash

Matthew Miller at Zdnet has covered it too. He wrote:

The first new upcoming browser is being showed at DEMO this week and is called SkyFire. Dieter Bohn had a chance to see a demo of it in action via Skype and posted his thoughts. SkyFire is a server side browser so all of the heavy lifting is done on their servers and then sent to the user. Apparently, the browser supports full Flash and AJAX too so it may be a great solution. However, these server side solutions are not generally free and require a subscription model so you may need to balance out how important the full internet is for you.

This should give you some idea. If you have better idea then you should read the press release that I found in Earth Times. An extract from the press release:

Today at the DEMO 08 conference, Skyfire unveiled a new mobile browser that makes browsing on a smartphone just like browsing on a PC. For the first time ever, smartphone users can experience the "real Web" to access and interact with any Web site built with any Web technology, including dynamic Flash, advanced Ajax, Java and more - at the same speeds they are accustomed to on their PC. With this free downloadable browser, users can finally watch videos from the real YouTube, stay connected with their friends on the full-feature PC versions of Facebook and MySpace, and listen to any Web music service like Last.fm. Before Skyfire, users painfully waited for these Flash and Ajax-heavy sites to render - often resulting in error messages or crashes.

You can show skyfire browser in action in the following Youtube video.

Internet is the place of websites. Web design is evolving all the time and there are new technologies coming. Web pages contain more than just HTML. So, browsing through the mobile phone is not an enjoyable experience for most people. The creators of Skyfire Browser feel that Skyfire browser would make all the mobile users happy.

Skyfire Labs, Inc. is behind Skyfire browser and they have a website:

http://www.skyfire.com/

Some features they said in their website:

Mobile Browsing Exactly Like PC Browsing

The Real Web, Served-Up Right

Go Anywhere, Get Anything

Blazing Fast

Easy to Use

They also said:

For the first time ever, you can watch any web video, listen to any web music, stay connected on any social network and browse whatever you want. Anything you can browse from your PC, you can now browse from your mobile phone.

We’re talking about full-featured PC versions of your favorite web sites. Skyfire gives you speedy page loads, full audio, video, images, dynamic Flash content, advanced Ajax, Java and more – just like your PC.

So, you see that flash, Ajax, Java, video, audio- Skyfire browser is covering everything. Well, I did not have any chance of taking a look at Skyfire browser but if you are looking for a good review then I would surely direct you to this one: Skyfire Mobile Web Browser Review written by Ed Hardy.

Ed Hardy wrote:

Skyfire acts generally like the iPhone browser. When you open a site, what you see is it shrunk down to fit on your smartphone's display. You can then tap on the screen to zoom in on sections of the page.

When I went to YouTube, what I saw was the full site, not a stripped down version. I selected a video and the page opened, and the video immediately began to play, with full motion and sound.

And all this happened really, really quickly. I went to New York Times site and the home page loaded in less than 4 seconds.

Ed Hardy and some others have caught the attention to the fact that when an user will browse Internet then they would do so through the server of Skyfire. Well, this is needed to ensure super blazing speed but at the same time, Skyfire would know what the users are browsing. So, privacy can be an issue for many users.

The emergence of Skyfire Browser will surely spice up the mobile browsing market. It is becoming a very big market and it is growing very fast. There are more than 2 billion mobile phone users. It is a reality that most of them do not browse Internet with their mobile phone but the number is surely increasing. So, the market for Skyfire browser can only grow from here.