Several readers have confirmed that the latest SkyFire Browser Beta can be downloaded and used anywhere in the world. Just point your mobile or PC Browser at get.skyfire.com and download. No registration is required. Skyfire runs on most Windows Mobile 5 and 6 and Symbian S60 3rd edition phones.
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. 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. But other aspects of Skyfire are incredibly good. In this review I'm going to speak frankly about the good and the bad.
If you download Skyfire remember that you are a Beta tester. 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.
Great For Video
First of all, if you have any interest in watching video on your phone, get this browser. 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. But Flash 8 is old and most web based video sites have upgraded to Flash 9 which S60 can't handle by itself. I've tried most of the major web video sites and the only ones where videos actually still play in the N95's native Webkit browser are YouTube and Blip.tv.
Skyfire 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 and of course YouTube using Skyfire. 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. 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, but it's limited to Flash 8 and its built in catalog and search functions only work with YouTube. Skyfire is a full-web browser. Using Google you can find and play almost any video on the web.
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. 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. 
The 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. Instead of converting pages into a 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, compresses it and sends it down to the client to display. 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). Video, which needs to refresh at least 10 times per second, must use a different technique. 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.
Video and 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. I'm not doing this to be negative, I think Skyfire is an amazing
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posted by Dennis Bournique
November 23, 2008 @ 8:15 pm
7 View Comments
