Thursday, October 16, 2008

Skyfire

I've been trying the Skyfire browser on my Treo 700wx for a few weeks now. It definitely has some advantages over the built-in Internet Explorer for viewing pages that aren't formatted for small screens or that are are media rich in nature.

However it also has some drawbacks. It must connect back to the Skyfire servers as it loads - looks like they proxy everything for you and convert the page to an image and send to the handheld - which means opening the browser for a quick peek at a website is slow. It is still in beta and has already gotten better from the initial release I was given.

The image of the page is first presented zoomed out and allows you to move the pointer to an area of interest then zoom in. While zoomed in, moving around the screen looks similar to looking at Google maps in that the checkerboard is displayed or parts of the page that have not been downloaded, then a rough image, and finally a full resolution image.

I've set it as my default browser so when I click a link from an email it pops up in the Skyfire browser instead of IE. This helps me to use it in time when I might otherwise not, though I still have IE in the Start Menu just in case.