Skyfire Beta 2 Browser Released for Symbian Handsets
If you live in the U.S. and happen to own a Nokia Symbian S60 (3rd Edition) smartphone, then dont miss your chance to be one of the first users to try the second beta of the world's fastest mobile browser from Skyfire.
But as far as Video Flash contents (YouTube alike) , music streaming (Last.fm alike) or heavy Ajax contents (MySpace, Facebook) , Skyfire is supposed to have them covered. I believe Skyfire redirects requests to their server, re-render complex contents before delivering to your handset. Therefore I would like to hear your experience, especially for non 3G users.
Skyfire works by having a proxy server sit between your browsing and the Internet. When you load a web page you send a request to Skyfire servers. Skyfire uses their proprietary technology, part of which is built on top of Mozilla's Firefox, to load the requested page and then sends it to your phone in a compressed Skyfire format. The Skyfire client running on the phone interprets this format and shows you the web page. A crucial extra compared to other proxy based browsers (e.g. Opera Mini) is the ability to fully interact with a page (e.g. AJAX functions, as used by many Web 2.0 sites).
Skyfire's technology works by running a heavily customised version of Firefox on the Skyfire server which does your browsing for you. Once it has accessed a page, the Skyfire server sends a version of the page to the Skyfire application running on your phone. The server does most of the hard (and resource intensive) work, leaving your phone to do basic rendering, which makes for faster browsing. And because the browser copy running on the server is on a PC it is able to handle almost any web page including those that use technologies like Flash, Java, Quicktime or AJAX. These are areas where traditional mobile browsers are weak. Moreover, the pages will look the same as they do on a PC because effectively you are using a PC browser.
The software is now available for selected private beta testers, and if you're willing to join them, sign up at the Skyfire's website now.
