Review: Skyfire Mobile Browser: Is This The Browser To Beat?

"Skyfire can handle just about any Web page, including iframes, in-place pop-ups like calendar pickers, and the browsing widget on Flickr that lets you scroll through a photo stream without changing the page."

The iPhone revolutionized mobile phone browsing, with a big screen, intuitive gestures, and a powerful browser based on the same Webkit rendering engine that's behind the desktop version of Safari, but there are still things it can't do (embedded Flash in particular). Browsers on the BlackBerry, Windows Mobile, and Symbian have been improving and both Fennec, the mobile version of Firefox, and Internet Explorer Mobile 6 (due in Windows Mobile 6.5), promise a full desktop browsing experience. But phone screens and keyboards are small, even with 3G bandwidth, which like batter life with WiFi connections, is limited. You're also never going to have the same processing power on a phone that you will on a desktop or notebook PC. All of these reasons are why Skyfire takes a slightly different approach.

This new browser for Windows Mobile and Symbian S60 (there's also a version for BlackBerry in private alpha testing) is based on Mozilla's Gecko rendering engine that Firefox uses, except it runs on Skyfire's data centers around the world rather than on your phone. The server does the hard work of decoding and rendering the page and then sends a compressed, interactive image to the Skyfire client on your phone.

1. Zoom When You Want To

Since the Skyfire server has already parsed the page, it knows what elements make it up. So when you zoom in (like when you want to read text designed for a PC-sized screen) it can zoom intelligently so you get a whole column of text, all the headlines in a block, or the whole picture, rather than having to scroll back and forth all the time.

Double-tap to zoom and Skyfire shows you a whole element on the page, not just what happens to fit at a standard zoom percentage.

However, you don't have to zoom in to work with a Web page, like you do with almost all other mobile browsers. That's because you don't always need to be able to read the text on a Web page. If you're typing in your password on a site or filling in address fields when it's obvious what goes where or just visiting a page you're very familiar with, you can click links, select Checkboxes, and Radio buttons or start typing into text fields without zooming in at all.

There is a slight delay when you select a field because Skyfire has to connect back to the server before you can type anything. The field is highlighted in red while the connection is made and the cursor appears when you can start typing. However, Skyfire makes up for that since you can click the OK button or press Enter to move on. You can copy and paste in text fields if your smart phone's operating system allows you to do that, but you can't copy text from Web pages. Also, to copy a link, you have to load it and copy from the Superbar.

Depending on the screen, smaller text is still just about legible, but when you zoom in, it increases in size immediately, instead of waiting for a round trip to the server to get a higher-resolution version (which is a big improvement over the beta).

2. Pages and Plug-Ins

Because Skyfire is based on a standard browsing engine, standard plug-ins work, including Flash, Silverlight, and Acrobat, as do QuickTime, Windows Media, Java, SVG, JavaScript, and CSS. At sites with Flash applications, for example, you can watch videos on YouTube or at open video links friends email you instead of having to load a separate YouTube application. That's even more useful for the many sites (like Hulu) that use Flash video but don't have specific hand-held or mobile phone applications.

Silverlight isn't nearly as common on the Web as Flash is, but there are still sites that use it for navigation and Skyfire supports these. Complex Silverlight applications won't work (and neither will some Flash apps and games), you can't enter text in a Flash or Silverlight app, and there are issues with the Netflix, Pandora, and Rhapsody media players because Skyfire doesn't let them work with local files.

Skyfire also has Adobe Reader built in so if you click the link to a .PDF file, it will open in Reader inside Skyfire. You get the full Reader controls, including page navigation, but this can be a little fiddly to work with.

3. CSS and JavaScript

Websites are getting more complex and Web apps are getting more powerful. In theory, Web apps are ideal for smart phones because you don't have to worry about installing or updating them, but they rely on powerful modern browsers. Parsing the combination of CSS, JavaScript, and Ajax usually requires tagging and navigating photos on Flickr or editing a file on Google Docs needs a powerful processor and a good JavaScript engine. Since it doesn't rely on the capabilities of the phone, Skyfire can handle just about any Web page, including iframes, in-place pop-ups like calendar pickers, and the browsing widget on Flickr that lets you scroll through a photo stream without changing the page.
The difference between using a mobile version of an airline site and the full version could mean you can check in online but not choose your seat. However, Skyfire can load complex pages like airline seat maps to allow you to do that. It can also load online banking sites, but while you might choose an airline because it makes it easy to check in from your smart phone, you probably wouldn't change banks to get a mobile-banking application. With Skyfire you can check a balance or pay a bill. The connection to the Skyfire server is encrypted and passwords on secure sites aren't saved, so it's not a security risk.

4. Full and Fast Browsing

We tested Skyfire with an HTC Touch Pro connected to an AT&T network over EDGE (2.5G) and a WiFi connection and with an HTC Touch on Verizon's 3G network. We then made a comparison using Opera on the same 3G HTC phone as well as a 3G iPhone, an iPhone connected to the same WiFi network, and a BlackBerry Bold on AT&T's 3G network. The speed at which Web pages load varies with the bandwidth of the phone's connection, the number of people using the same cell phone, and the traffic on the Web server, so we loaded every page a number of times and took the average connection speed. Although you can often start reading or scrolling through a page before it's fully loaded, we timed the full page load, as shown by both the on-screen display and the loading bar.

We timed loading pages on six popular sites, but only Skyfire was able to support all the features on all these sites. Some mobile browsers were redirected to the mobile version of YouTube, CNN, and the BBC--and the mobile sites obviously loaded more quickly than the full versions of the sites.

Browsing times on Symbian S60 phones are similar, but while the page download is about the same, rendering the page image is usually slower because most Symbian phones have much less powerful processors than Windows Mobile devices do. Skyfire has one feature that may speed up browsing on Symbian: it will remember the last connection you used for getting online so you don't have to select it yourself every time (and you can change the connection type from inside Skyfire, if you leave a WiFi hotspot, for example).

Skyfire is consistently faster than other browsers are at loading Web pages, especially large and complex Web pages. With long pages that have a lot of scripts and page elements, like the full News and Reviews section here at Tom's Guide, you can really see the difference between a 3G connection and a slower 2.5G EDGE phone. The screen size of the phone you use also makes a difference--the iPhone shows more of the page onscreen, so it has to download more of the page to start wit

5. CSS Performance: Flickr

We also timed loading a user's Photostream page on Flickr. This shows the last 18 photos plus thumbnails for sets and has many scripts running on the page as well as a complex CSS layout. The page loads three times as fast in Skyfire as it does in the iPhone Safari browser and on a 3G or WiFi connection. With an EDGE connection, Skyfire is as fast or faster at loading the page as a 3G iPhone is. That's due to a combination of the images being compressed, which are thus faster to load, and the complex CSS rendering being done on the server rather than on the phone.

Skyfire is so much faster than Safari on this page that it's as fast on EDGE as Safari on 3G.

The CSS layout of the Flickr site looks clean and simple but it's technically demanding. Both Skyfire and Safari cope with all the CSS and lay out the page correctly, as if you were viewing it in a desktop browser. Opera and the BlackBerry browser take much longer to load the page and neither shows the full and correct layout, but they do both load the full Flickr site rather than defaulting to the mobile version, which is a smaller page with less functionality (it only shows four images and none of the sets).

The combination of images, scripts, and CSS make Flickr a challenging site for a mobile browser and the size of images does a good job of testing browser performance.

6. Web Performance: CNN and BBC News

If you just want the news headlines, a text-only page or an RSS feed is fine. But if you visit CNN or the BBC to see images and video or to leave your comments about stories, then you want to see a full, rich version of the page.

Skyfire loads the front page of CNN twice as fast as Safari does on the iPhone and nearly five times as fast as the browser on the BlackBerry Bold. Opera seemed to have a problem finishing the scripts on the page. Although the headlines, links, and layout seemed to have loaded fully after a minute and we could read the stories and scroll through the page, the progress bar was still showing the page as loading after three minutes.

The BBC News page took a similar amount of time to load. However, the differences between the 3G, EDGE, and WiFi speeds for Skyfire say more about the variable speeds and bandwidth of mobile data connections than they do about Skyfire, while the relative load times for Safari and Opera are consistent with the CNN page load times. The browser on the BlackBerry Bold gets redirected to the mobile version of the BBC site, which takes the same time to load over 3G as the full site does in Skyfire over an EDGE connection.

Skyfire is consistently faster than other mobile browsers at loading a popular Web site like CNN.

You can load the full BBC News page n Skyfire in the same time it takes to load the mobile version on the BlackBerry Bold.

7. Video Performance: Hulu and YouTube

Watch clips and full-length TV shows on Hulu.

You may not have to load the Hulu front page very often, as Hulu is one of the video feeds that shows up on the Skyfire start page, so you can click to go straight to a video.

When you do load it, it's fast. This isn't a complex screen, but it has a lot of images and CSS to build the layout. It loads very quickly in Skyfire on a 3G connection because the images are compressed on the server rather than resized in the mobile browser. The iPhone screen shows more of the Hulu page so it has more images to load, which also slows it down. On the BlackBerry, rendering layout and scripts takes up a lot of the loading time. With Opera, the page loads slow--and instead of the large image banner at the top of the page, it shows a warning that the browser can?t play the Flash videos on the site.

We couldn't compare the speed of watching videos as few other mobile browsers support Hulu, but opening the front page gives consistent results.

Few mobile browsers open the full YouTube site; again Skyfire loads the full page and loads it consistently fastest.

Hulu relies on streaming and buffering the streaming content for a good experience when playing longer video clips. With Skyfire, the buffering happens at the Skyfire server, but this manages the connection to the Skyfire browser so you still get a good streaming experience if your connection is fast enough (you need to be on WiFi or 3G). The video quality is also extremely impressive.

YouTube video quality depends much more on the original video quality, and the intelligent zooming is more useful on YouTube if you don't want to bother clicking the tiny full-screen button; you can just zoom in to the video.

8. Making Browsing Easier On A Phone

Viewing a Web page on a smart phone screen is only half the battle as you have to get to the right page in the first place and often you want to interact with a Website by filling in forms and entering text. Even if you have a phone with a QWERTY keyboard, typing in a long URL isn't always easy, especially if you're trying to use the phone with one hand. However, you can use the Superbar at the top of the Skyfire window to type in a URL or to search (via Google) and Skyfire offers suggestions based on common search terms and URLs. You thus often only have to type a few characters to enter a full URL or complex search.

Search suggestions save on typing.

The numeric shortcuts for key menu items help as well. If you don't have a touch screen, trackball, or five-way controller on your phone you can press 2 and type in a URL or search keyword, while 5 refreshes the page the way F5 does in a desktop browser. You will still need to use the keyboard and the cursor that lets you pan around even without a touch screen, but shortcuts like these make it easier to browse on the go using only one hand rather than having to stop and sit down to get anything done.

Numeric shortcuts speed up browsing on a phone without a touchscreen but you can still use sites like YouTube.

9. Bookmarks

Once you've visited a site you can save it as a bookmark, as you can in any PC browser. If you've zoomed in and panned to a particular area of the page--like the Latest News or Latest Reviews panels at Tom's Guide--then that's what you'll see when you open the bookmark again.

Add your own bookmarks to Skyfire.

Skyfire comes with a set of popular sites already bookmarked and categorized into Video, Social, News, Local, Sports, and Games. You can delete these if you don't use them and move your own bookmarks into the other categories if you don't want to leave them in the Unsorted section (but you can't create new categories to put your bookmarks in). If you change phones, set up a free Skyfire account and log in on both handsets and your bookmarks will show up in both places.

One drawback is that because your bookmarks are stored as a Web page in Skyfire, then the list takes time to open up, and when you do open it, you navigate away from the page you're in. So if you change your mind, you will have to wait for it to reload. But like opening a bookmark, the page will come back in the same place and at the same zoom level as before.

Set up a Skyfire account and you can save bookmarks on one phone and use them on another.

10. The Skyfire Start Page

Sometimes you know exactly what Web page you want to visit, and sometimes you're just looking for something to do while you wait for the bus to arrive. The RSS feeds on the start page that you see when you first open Skyfire are useful for both. You can add a feed for your favorite pages to make it faster to get to the latest stories and you'll find something interesting to look at when you have a little time to kill.

Skyfire includes links to ESPN, Google News, Digg, Yahoo, Hulu, and YouTube on this page, in addition to some you may not have heard of, like Howcast. Icons let you see which service a news story is from before you follow the link.

Click the Customize link to turn the default feeds on and off (you can't remove them completely). You can also add the news feeds you want to follow on the My Feeds tab. If you know the URL of the feed or the URL of the Website, you can type it in yourself or you can just type in some keywords to search for RSS feeds that cover a topic.

If you don't usually look at any of the links on the Start page, they won't slow you down. You don't have to wait for them to load because the Superbar is the first thing that is available, so you can start typing a URL or search right away.

See RSS feeds and friend updates together on the Skyfire start page.

Pick and choose from the default RSS feeds for the start page.

You can type in the URL for an RSS feed you want to follow...

...or search for a feed that covers your interests.

11. Getting Social with Skyfire

Early smart phone users tended to browse the Web for basic information, such as for addresses, directions, opening times and other information that was useful. But when you look at the Web in a desktop browser, it's as much about sharing information and connecting with people. Skyfire takes some steps in that direction by letting you add Facebook and Twitter to the list of feeds on the start page and it also has some simple tools for sharing information.

Skyfire uses Facebook Connect so it doesn't store your password.

To start with, you need to associate your Facebook or Twitter account with Skyfire. This will add Facebook status updates and tweets from people you follow to the list of news feeds on the start page (if this gets overwhelming, you can use the Filter drop-down to choose which feeds are visible). Now you can click Update My Status to send a Twitter message and update Facebook at the same time.

Update your Facebook status or tweet from Skyfire.

You can also send a link to the page you're currently viewing to Facebook or Twitter from the Share menu. You get the option of adding a short comment to explain the link and the URL is shortened to a custom Skyfire URL to fit into the character limits for messages. You can also send a link by SMS, but oddly not by email?which would have been a useful way to send links back to yourself to look at in a full Web browser.

There's a "Share this article" link for all the RSS feed stories on your start page as well. It's easier to click this than to find the (oddly named) Page Online command from the Share menu, but we're not sure if many people will want to share something as soon as they see it rather than after they read the story and the links mean you see fewer stories on the start page.

When you like a Web page you can send the link as an SMS-- or post it to Facebook or Twitter.

You can share the old-fashioned way, by downloading images to your phone. You do this by pressing and holding the cursor or choosing "Save image" from the Actions menu when you have an image selected. This doesn't work for password-protected files, though.

12. Better Search

If you use the standard Windows Mobile Today screen, you can add a Skyfire search bar to it (this won't work if you use one of the custom Windows Mobile interfaces like HTC's TouchFlo or the XPERIA panels). You can set Skyfire as the default browser on Windows Mobile (though not on Symbian). But most of the time, you'll be searching from the Superbar.

The search bar is linked directly to Google (and there isn't an option to switch to another search engine, although you can open any search site you want as a Web page). Because loading multiple pages to find what you want is irritating on a mobile browser, Skyfire now puts all the results in a single list so you'll find videos, new articles, and local business results on the same page as Web pages. If you don't see what you want in the first few results, you can click to get more search results or you can refine the search to look at just mobile Web pages, local businesses, news, or images.It's a reasonable compromise to delivering useful search results on such a small screen without making you type extra keywords like "image" or "video" as search items to start with.

Skyfire puts all kinds of search results together...

...but you can split them up if that's what you prefer.

13. Prefer the Mobile Web?

Some mobile versions of Websites are well thought out, well designed, and give you exactly what you want to see when you're on the go. They're designed for a smaller screen, and just because you can see the full Website, doesn't mean you always want to. If you do want to book a flight or look up where the lounge is in the airport, you need the full airline site. But if you're flying with Delta, being able to check in and see the flight status is what you usually want and the mobile site gives you just that.

Most mobile browsers give you no choice, or rather the sites you visit don't give you a choice. When they see a mobile browser, the sites redirect you to their mobile version. That doesn't happen with Skyfire, because it reports itself as a desktop browser based on Gecko, so you get the full site. If you?re going to want to use mobile sites frequently, keep the option to get a hint when there's a mobile version of the site you're visiting and Skyfire will put a link in a small infobar at the top of the page. If the infobar gets in the way, you can turn it off from Settings.

Ask for hints so you know when there's a mobile version of a site.

The mobile hint doesn't get in the way and lets you switch to a mobile site quickly.

14. Conclusion

Mobile browsing is becoming mainstream, thanks to the iPhone (which has only 8% of the smart phone market share, but generated 43% of mobile Web requests and 65% of mobile HTML usage as of April this year, according to analyst firm AdMob Mobile Metrics). Worldwide, Symbian phones are the most popular and generate 43% of mobile Web requests around the world, but the more powerful Safari browser on iPhone is having an obvious effect on usage. Internet Explorer Mobile is a long way behind other mobile browsers and Internet Explorer 6 Mobile will only be available with new handsets (or upgrades to Windows Mobile 6.5).

Skyfire gives Windows Mobile and Symbian users a mobile Web experience that's at least as good as that of the iPhone and with support for Flash and Silverlight, so you can use the real versions of Websites rather than cut-down mobile versions. Compressing Web pages also improves mobile browsing, which is an advantage more powerful mobile browsers won't have when they arrive. This means Skyfire will still be attractive when Fennec and Internet Explorer Mobile 6 offer Flash browsing.

The intelligent zooming is another excellent feature for mobile browsing. It can't solve all the problems of viewing a full-size page on a pocket-size device, but it means that viewing the real Web on your phone isn't just technically possible--it's actually usable.

You need a reasonably fast connection to enjoy streaming video on a phone, but Skyfire gives you a good interface to sites like Hulu.

Everything in Skyfire is a Web page, even your settings.

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