{"id":4950,"date":"2009-08-25T22:11:37","date_gmt":"2009-08-26T05:11:37","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/wapreview.com\/?p=4950"},"modified":"2009-09-03T18:45:38","modified_gmt":"2009-09-04T01:45:38","slug":"skyfire-1-1-faster-startup-better-usability","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/wapreview.com\/4950\/","title":{"rendered":"SkyFire 1.1 – Faster Startup, Better Usability"},"content":{"rendered":"

Late yesterday SkyFire released version 1.1 of their namesake browser for Windows Mobile 5 and 6\u00a0 and Symbian S60 3rd edition.\u00a0 You can download SkyFire 1.1 to your phone or PC from get.skyfire.com<\/a>.<\/p>\n

\"SkyFire<\/p>\n

I’ve been using SkyFire since the first Symbian release over a year ago.\u00a0 From the beginning it has done an amazing job with videos. It’s the only mobile browser that lets you watch the Flash videos on almost any web site including, YouTube, Daily Motion, Vimeo, Veoh, uStream, fastcompany.tv and Blip.tv.\u00a0 It used to work with Hulu too, although lately Hulu has been evil and is \u00a0 arbitrarily blocking<\/a> SkyFire.\u00a0 On a good WiFi or 3G connection SkyFire videos play smoothly with no pauses for buffering. In addition to Flash, SkyFire\u00a0 supports the current desktop versions of\u00a0 Silverlight, Quicktime and Java Applets.<\/p>\n

While I’ve always liked SkyFire for rich media, I’ve never been satisfied with it as a general-purpose web-browser. In previous releases\u00a0 scrolling was slow and it took too many clicks and keypresses to perform simple tasks.\u00a0 A bigger issue was that the text on many sites, including this one, was too small to read easily when columns were fit to the screen width.\u00a0 Zooming in to get a readable text size did not re-flow text necessitating scrolling horizontally across each line to read, which I consider unacceptable.<\/p>\n

First impressions of 1.1 were favorable. Download and installation of 1.1 over 1.0 when smoothly with my bookmarks and cookies preserved.\u00a0 Startup seems much faster<\/strong>. Scrolling and zooming are also supposed to be faster but I didn’t notice much change and they still seem slow compared with other browsers.\u00a0 The real problem with scrolling and zooming is that SkyFire loads pages incrementally, when you scroll into a new part of the page the screen is blank except for a checkerboard pattern for about a second before the content loads.<\/p>\n

I immediately noticed\u00a0 a nice usability enhancement, dedicated page up [2]\u00a0 and down [8] keys. Thank you SkyFire, scrolling one line at a time is the pits, something I wish that the Nokia Webkit team understood.<\/p>\n

SkyFire now has a pretty decent set of handy one key shortcuts<\/p>\n