Windows Phone Thoughts - Daily News, Views, Rants and Raves

"We are excited about our Skyfire 1.1 version. This release focuses on performance improvements for both platforms and specific improvements related to Symbian scrolling and zooming. In addition, we've improved the reconnect experience and mobile website browsing."

SkyFire 1.1 has a number of improvements over the initial 1.0 release. Some of the biggies are:

• Improved page load times. For sites that take a long time to load, we updated our algorithm to bring you the content much quicker.
• Improved reconnect. Skyfire will show clearly when you can start interacting with the web page in case it previously timed out and disconnected (to save battery life).
• WML support. If you are browsing to mobile sites that use the old mobile WML markup, you can now view the content.

There are more features and fixes listed at the link below. If you want to download it directly to your device, go to m.skyfire.com

"It's looking more and more like Mozilla is ready to really do this: Late last night, the organization posted the first public beta of the browser that could end up being "Firefox Mobile." It still goes by the code name Fennec, and the first beta is testing whether touchscreen mobile users will be willing to have literally all their browser functions be placed off-screen, if it makes room for more elements of the Web page."

What I find interesting - and impressive - is that Fennec is going to have TraceMonkey, the JavaScript engine that will come with Firefox 3.5. Usually mobile components tend to be stripped down, pale shadows of their desktop counters - it's nice to see the Mozilla developers putting performance at the forefront. Right now the beta is only for desktop Windows, which surprises me a little bit - you'd think that the beta stage was when they'd be ready to do the on device testing after the desktop testing in the Alpha stage. Still, I'm thrilled to see Fennec starting to gain some momentum - with the continued fumbling by Microsoft in getting a great mobile browser into the hands of its customers, it's nice to see another option coming for us to use.

"When Live Labs began working on Deepfish, we didn't set out to create a new mobile browser. What we set out to do was to prove our theory that there was an unmet demand for a better mobile browsing experience than what was available at the time we started the project in 2006, and that a novel and simple new user experience was the best way to achieve that. The positive reception and incredible demand for the Deepfish technical preview went a long way towards proving that. And now, thanks in part to Deepfish, many better alternatives are emerging."

Microsoft Research projects are always a bit hard to figure out - Microsoft puts a huge amount of money into R&D, but I'm often left scratching my head when it comes to what they actually get out of it. This article has some insights, but Deepfish seems like a project that didn't seem to go anywhere. We originally posted about Deepfish back in March of 2007, and certainly by then there was many browser initiatives underway - not the least of which was the iPhone which would launch to much fanfare some three months later. So what did Deepfish give us? I'm not sure - it was a proxy-based solution, which in the long-haul doesn't really scale well to a large user-base. If you're RIM and you're selling a server solution it does, but fundamentally any server-based service needs a revenue model and I didn't see Deepfish providing a solution in that regard. Were any of you still actively using Deepfish? Will you be sad to see it go, or have you already moved on to other browser solutions?