{"id":1943,"date":"2008-11-23T20:15:05","date_gmt":"2008-11-24T03:15:05","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/wapreview.com\/?p=1943"},"modified":"2008-11-23T20:15:05","modified_gmt":"2008-11-24T03:15:05","slug":"skyfire-browser-beta-085-for-s60-full-review","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/wapreview.com\/1943\/","title":{"rendered":"Skyfire Browser Beta 0.85 for S60 – Full Review"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"SkyfireSeveral readers have confirmed that the latest SkyFire Browser Beta can be downloaded and used anywhere in the\u00a0 world.\u00a0 Just point your mobile or PC Browser at get.skyfire.com<\/a> and download.\u00a0 No registration is required.\u00a0 Skyfire runs on most Windows Mobile 5 and 6 and Symbian S60 3rd edition phones.<\/p>\n

I’ve been using the new Beta, v 0.85.0.7935, on my N95-3 for a couple of days now – here are my impressions. Keep in mind that Skyfire is a Beta<\/strong>. There are parts of Skyfire that are clearly not finished and in my opinion keep Skyfire from being a good choice as your primary browser.\u00a0 But other aspects of Skyfire are incredibly good.\u00a0 In this review I’m going to speak frankly about the good and the bad.<\/p>\n

If you download Skyfire remember that you are a Beta tester.\u00a0 Skyfire is not a finished product, there are bugs. If you find a bug please report it to the Skyfire team using the Beta Forum<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Great For Video<\/strong><\/p>\n

First of all, if you have any interest in watching video on your phone, get this browser<\/strong>. There’s nothing else like it. Sure, S60 3rd edition phones like have pretty good video capabilities out of the box. They do a great job with mobile video formats and can even play Flash 8 FLVs.\u00a0 But Flash 8 is old and most web based video sites have upgraded to Flash 9 which S60 can’t handle by itself.\u00a0 I’ve tried most of the major web video sites\u00a0 and the only ones where videos actually still play in the N95’s native Webkit browser are YouTube and Blip.tv.<\/p>\n

\"SkyFireSkyfire can display almost any web based Flash or Silverlight video or animation. I had no trouble watching videos from Daily Motion, Vimeo, Veoh, Hulu uStream, fastcompany.tv, Blip.tv <\/strong><\/em>and of course YouTube<\/strong><\/em> using Skyfire.\u00a0 With a good3G connection or WiFi video playback is very smooth, with no stuttering or hangs at all. The latest Skyfire Beta is also very stable when streaming video. I spent about an hour watching videos on all the sites mentioned above with the longest clip being over 15 minutes long and Skyfire handled them all perfectly. This is a huge improvement over the first Skyfire S60 Beta five months ago which consistently crashed after 2 minutes of video streaming.\u00a0 The Skyfire team has done a great job of archiving faultless video playback and stability. Skyfire is absolutely the best Flash player I’ve ever used on my N95. I’m also a fan of the standalone player Mobitubia<\/strong><\/em>, but it’s limited to Flash 8 and its built in catalog and search functions only work with YouTube.\u00a0 Skyfire is a full-web browser. Using Google you can find and play almost any video on the web.<\/p>\n

Like Opera Mini, Skyfire is a proxy based browser. Skyfire servers do most of the work of interpreting and displaying pages and handling user interactions.\u00a0 The data sent between server and client is not html but a highly compressed binary representation of just the portion of a page that the user is currently viewing. Skyfire uses Firefox as its rendering engine.\u00a0 \"SkyfireThe exact details of how Skyfire works haven’t been disclosed but based on hints on the Skyfire forums, I believe that it uses some sort of image based rendering.\u00a0 Instead of converting pages into a\u00a0 binary page description language, which is what Opera Mini does, it looks like Skyfire captures an image of all or part of the rendered page,\u00a0 compresses it and sends it down to the client to display.\u00a0 There is probably some kind of incremental update that resends just changed parts of the page as needed. You can see evidence of this when scrolling, new parts of the page first appear out of focus and slowly sharpen like a progressive jpeg on a slow connection (image above, left).\u00a0 Video, which needs to refresh at least 10 times per second, must use a different technique.\u00a0 Regardless of how Skyfire actually works, pages load very quickly with excellent support for JavaScript and AJAX in addition to Flash and Silverlight. Rendering is very accurate too. Most websites look the same as they do in the desktop Firefox browser.<\/p>\n

Video and\u00a0 JavaScript support and rendering accuracy are the best features of Skyfire at this point in its development. In the rest of this post, I’m going to discuss where I feel the browser needs work.\u00a0 I’m not doing this to be negative, I think Skyfire is an amazing effort.\u00a0 It’s clear that the Skyfire team has focused their efforts so far on video performance, stability and scaling the back end and they have succeed admirably in these efforts.\u00a0 What’s needed now is attention to\u00a0 usability, power consumption<\/strong> and connection management<\/strong>.\u00a0 Skyfire is already the best S60 video player, with some improvement in these areas Skyfire can be the best S60 browser overall.<\/p>\n

Inefficient User Interface<\/strong><\/p>\n

The user experience, especially when dealing with pages that are mostly text leaves a lot to be desired.\u00a0 It takes more key presses and time to get through common tasks like checking email or keeping up with a hundreds of feeds in Bloglines using Skyfire compared with Opera Mini, Webkit or Opera Mobile.\u00a0 There are a number of different reasons, all of which are basically usability issues:<\/p>\n