In some ways, Skyfire had gotten a little ahead of itself. It was based on a solid server-side optimization model, which compresses websites—including Flash and Flash video—to speed up loading over a mobile connection. As advanced as its rendering powers were, it had some glaring problems. One higher-resolution screens, which are common on Windows Mobile phones, the text looked fuzzy and pixelated. The interface was functional, but a bit small and convoluted in places, which made it a chore to use on some touchscreen phones. Scrolling was kludgy, and zooming was haphazard. Cue the version 1.5 changelog:

• Full VGA Support. Skyfire now provides native support for the VGA and wVGA resolutions as seen on many recent Windows Mobile phones.
Smooth Scrolling. Kinetic scrolling has been added to Skyfire. Flick and you will see that scrolling has become very smooth.

• Finger friendly UI. There are many UI updates to enable finger friendliness, increase the ease of use and add a bit of fun to the Skyfire experience. We updated as well the start page to be simpler-to-use with high-resolution devices.

• Full screen mode. For touch screens we have a mode that will completely remove all UI elements from the screen to provide maximum visibility onto the page. Tap the bottom right corner to bring back the toolbar.

• Auto-Move text entry. This keeps any text entry box visible when the virtual keyboard is used. This convenient feature assures that web site forms are easy to use, in case the SIP (i.e., virtual keyboard) covers it.

• Latest versions of Flash 10 and Silverlight. 1.5 has been updated to the newest and most stable versions of both rich-media formats.

• Performance enhancements. Both Skyfire's client and servers have been upgraded for faster, more responsive browsing.

The best thing about Skyfire hasn't changed: It's free. [Skyfire]

At first glance the browser is a bit of a mess: its Android Market listing is subliterate, and its interface—the tabs, specifically—look kind of assy on the Droid's higher-resolution screen. Beyond the glitches, though, it's a capable browser, with gesture support, RSS integration and yes, multitouch.

Dolphin's multitouch implementation works on a number of handsets aside from the Droid, from the Hero, which supports multitouch out of the box, to Cyanogen-modded G1s and MyTouch 3Gs, which don't. It works much better on faster hardware though: where it's a bit laggy on a stock Hero, it's surprisingly smooth on Motorola's speedier terminator phone. At any rate, it's free, and available now in the Market, so, go. [Dolphin via Engadget Mobile]

BlackBerry just put out a call for WebKit developers, for a very specific reason:

Utilizing their knowledge in C++ programming, the successful candidate will be working in a fast-paced, dynamic development environment to develop a WebKit-based browser for the BlackBerry Platform.

Ok! The only question now is, when? Normally the initial hiring of a core developer could be taken to mean that the project is embryonic, and the final product still months away, but keep in mind: In Torch Mobile's Iris, RIM bought an entire, complete browser. In other words, this may just be an optimization project, not a full-on browser development, so decent browsing on BlackBerry could be closer than we thought. [CareerBeacon via Engadget]

Peter-Paul Koch at Quirksmode devised a battery of rendering tests to see how different WebKit browsers measure up, and ran everything from desktop Safari 4 to the Pre's browser to S60V5 through a CSS and Javascript compatibility course. Evidently, some WebKit browsers are barely WebKit browsers at all—especially on mobile. Some surprises? Android browsers aren't so hot, nor is the Pre's. And Nokia, which has had WebKit browsers forever, can't seem to make a good one.

There are really two culprits here: older versions of WebKit, which cripple browsers like S60v3's; and developers' need to pare their software down to make it run smoothly on mobile devices. In other words, some of these browsers have been stripped of HTML, CSS and Javascript rendering capabilities on purpose.

What'd be really interesting is if the above chart reflected speed and performance measurements too, because as (apparently) bad as the Android G1's browser is at rendering obscure CSS elements, actually using it is a far sight more enjoyable than struggling with the unconscionably slow Iris on Windows Mobile. Full methodology and test list at [Quirksmode via IntoMobile]

The idea is to mirror the desktop version as much as possible. Open a new tab and you'll see the visual speed dial thumbnails, which you can also customize based on your browsing history. The new version can also be set to store login details on your phone.

As with Opera 4.2, YouTube videos will play via your phone's native media player, and there's still no Flash support. What also sucks: This beta won't support Skins and Opera Link, though both should be reintroduced as development continues.
[Opera: Full Website | Mobile version]

Given that Torch Mobile only makes one piece of software (currently unavailable), that they say their main contribution to the aforementioned "enhancement" will be "utilizing [their] WebKit-based mobile browser expertise," and that the iPhone, Android and Symbian have made WebKit the de facto standard for decent mobile web browsing, it's not hard to guess what's going on here. Also interesting: This comes just a week after rumors that BlackBerrys would soon(ishly) support Flash and Silverlight out of the box.

Now that we know RIM is serious about WebKit, the only questions left start with "when?" You know, like when will BlackBerry OS ship with its first WebKit browser? And when will everyone else finally just give up on doing anything else? [Torch Mobile via BGR]

Newly added treats include updated themes and a tweaked UI, improved add-on support and numerous bug fixes. We gave the alpha a quick spin and found that while a bit slow, it shows plenty of promise. The interface and overall experience is actually pretty usable, and it renders pages beautifully.

A corresponding Maemo release for Nokia's N810 has also been made available. If you want to know what all the fuss is about (or you're one of those add-on writing folks we love so much), then you can experiment with the desktop versions for Windows, Mac OS X and Linux.

Update: And it looks like there may be some reprieve coming to neglected Android users as well, eventually. [Mozilla—Thanks, Tim!]

The release notes point to a few major changes from earlier versions of the browser, emphasizing better text rendering, faster startup, easier controls and improved compatibility with complex AJAX-driven pages like Facebook and Gmail. To be honest, the changes aren't massive, but a few of them make noticeable differences.

Rendering quality was never an issue with Skyfire, and it's hard to discern any huge improvements on this front. Pages are still compressed server-side, which keeps things moving quickly. As a result, pages load extremely fast—I was able to pull down the Giz frontpage, flash ads and all, in under 20 seconds—but image (and unfortunately, text) resolution isn't as high as it would be on an uncompressed browser like Opera Mobile or Mobile Safari. Thankfully, 1.0 is optimized such that even zoomed-out, smaller text is mostly legible, and in a welcome improvement upon the betas, instantly becomes clear when zoomed.

The image associated with this post is best viewed using a browser.About that zooming: controls have been spruced up all around, especially for touch users. Previous versions of the browser suffered from awkward zooming quirks and poor text reflowing, but these issues are by and large resolved in 1.0. Double-taps behave much more predictably, and most sites are easy enough to traverse thanks to smoothed-out panning. You can also click without zooming in, which Skyfire will usually interpret correctly.

Flash video viewing has always been Skyfire's banner feature, allowing users to watch native video embeds and services like Hulu on their phones, but it's largely unchanged for version 1.0. Playback is still smooth and loading is quick enough, although taps have a tendency to misregister, meaning you're better off initiating flash video with the browsers onscreen mouse cursor and a d-pad, assuming you have that luxury.

It's not quite perfect, but in the disparate, but as far as Windows Mobile and Symbian browsers go, it's as close as you're going to get. Well, at least until Opera Mobile 9.7 comes out.

On the rumored BlackBerry version of the app, Skyfire has issued confirmation that they're "planning" one. Funny, since we've already seen it. For now, you can download Skyfire for Windows Mobile or Symbian now by navigating to get.skyfire.com on your phone's browser. You'll have to uninstall any previous versions of the browser before you can use 1.0—annoyingly, there's no direct way to upgrade. Release notes below. [Skyfire]

What's new:

Thumbnail interaction. Now you can click on links immediately after the page loads without having
to zoom in. This enhancement is especially helpful for high resolution phones, and for familiar sites
where you know right away where you want to click. It makes getting to the content you want on
the page simpler, quicker and more efficient.
Improved Zoom. Double-tap or double-click to zoom over any element, including links, images or
videos. The zoom interaction is smoother and more responsive as well. Best of all: when you zoom
in you will get readable text instantly (beforehand text was blurry and took a while to become
sharp).
Enhanced Navigation. When you navigate back or forward, you return to the last viewport (e.g.
zoom level and portion of the page). Thus eliminating the need to pan and zoom into the section
you were viewing on the previous page. We remember even the viewport when you select a page
from your history. We have also added shortcut keys, (9) for forward and (7) for backward
navigation.

Improved page handling. Enhancements have been made especially for AJAX-intensive sites such as
Facebook and Gmail. If larger parts of the page get updated then the client will more quickly and
accurately reflect this.

iFrame handling. We have a solution for full-width iFrames in Skyfire
Fast start. We changed both the sequence and behavior of the Skyfire launch so you get started as
quickly as possible. You can type a search or URL in the Superbar while Skyfire is connecting in the
background. You can put Skyfire to work before the start page is even loaded. Plus, we've improved
connection performance.

Reconnect to last state. When you leave Skyfire in the background Skyfire will disconnect to
preserve battery life. Once you come back to it (after minutes, hours, days) it will reload the same
page to the same zoom level and focus. Thus you can continue right where you left off.
When you exit and start again, Skyfire you will always land on the start page.

Connection helper. We have a new mechanism in place to detect when connections cannot be
established to Skyfire servers. If this is due to a network configuration (common in GSM land), then
we provide suggestions to help out. This is especially useful if you are with a carrier/data plan that
places restrictions on certain APN configurations, which interferes with Skyfire.

Enhanced search results. Google results now include video, news articles, local results all blended
on a single results page and ordered by relevance. Vertical search categories are still available.
Improved RSS feed search. Find your favorite custom RSS feeds through the improved Add-Feed
feature, found under the Customize menu on the start page. Search by site domain, feed URL, or
even topical keywords.

Easier sharing of RSS items from start page. We've exposed a simple "Share this article" link below
each RSS story displayed on your start page to make it easier to share interesting items to Twitter
and Facebook

Remember last connection (Symbian only). Skyfire can now remember the last connection for you,
so you will not have to choose a connection every single time. In addition if you want to change the
connection type while you are in Skyfire you can do so.

Known issues in this release

HTTP Authentication (e.g. the native browser dialog that asks for username and password when
going to certain sites) is not supported.
Text entry into Flash or Silverlight plug-ins is not supported.
Skyfire does not support ‘local storage' mode for plug-ins. Thus the following will be affected: Netflix
media player, Pandora media player, Rhapsody media player.

How's that, exactly? For one, Flash Lite will be supported, opening up a plethora of previously inaccessible streaming video sites. Google Gears will provide offline Google web apps and better performance, competing with the upcoming Offline Gmail feature bound for WebKit-based browsers. OpenGL ES hardware acceleration will add a missing fluidity to movements, assuming your phone has 3D hardware and drivers (like most HTC handsets). Most importantly, 9.7 will have the option to connect to Opera Turbo, the content compression service used in Opera Mini, which does a lot to knock down loading times for a small sacrifice in image quality.

Fans of Skyfire might notice that these features—excluding Gears—are all available on their browser already. True! But one thing isn't: proper VGA and WVGA support, which prevents it from being usable on every desirable Windows Mobile phone, period. So basically, this is very good news. [Opera Mobile via Information Week]

The build is very rough and probably not usable for day-to-day browsing—early reports suggest that the loading time is very long, and that page loading is quite slow pretty much broken—but it might provide a glimpse of where Firefox Mobile is headed, how it will render pages and if its novel control scheme is usable on a device smaller than the N810.

The CAB download is available here, but I had no luck launching the app on my T-Mobilized HTC Touch Diamond variant. Let us know about your successes and failures in the comments. UPDATE: A consensus has emerged! It's not at all ready yet. It's to be taken as an assurance of forward movement, I guess. [WMExperts via Slashphone]

Changes for this release:

1. added JSR-75 (File API) support which gives access to the SD card for
uploading and downloading and also the possibility to save pages locally
2. added support for video playback (Opera Mini hands over to the
operating system video player)
3. double tap works for zoom/unzoom
4. use of inline url entry instead of native textbox
5. fixed password text entry to show hidden characters
6. fixed problems with exiting application when back button was pressed
7. Improved trackball speed.
8. Using Extra Large font in the builtin pages.

+ many small tweaks and fixes

[Opera]

The quote isn't gospel, but it's a pretty solid indicator:

We are targeting a Milestone release for the first week of February, targeting the HTC Touch Pro

The Touch Pro is an interesting choice for the first release; the decision, I'd wager, stemmed from the ease of porting—resizing interface elements and managing the GUI is much easier when you got the Pro's 480x640 display to work with, and dealing with performance issues, which were evident in the early Nokia N810 build as well as the emulator, wouldn't be so hard on this relatively beefy piece of hardware. Not to mention the fact that the QWERTY keyboard simplifies finger-friendly text input.

Whatever the reasoning, the release of a Windows Mobile version of Fennec represents significant progress toward a wide Windows Mobile release. Plus, I don't see why this build wouldn't at least sort of work on other VGA WinMo phones like the functionally identical Touch Diamond. [ElectricPig via ShinyShiny]

The version you see above is for BlackBerry, though functionality should be almost identical between platforms. Like Skyfire of Opera Mini, Bolt performs a good deal of page optimization server-side, meaning that it's fast. In fact, compared to the Bold's stock browser, it's really fast. Rendering accuracy looks about as good as any other WebKit-based mobile browser (Safari, Chrome, S60 default browser) but appears significantly snappier than its competition.

Bolt is in a private beta for now, but you can request an invite here.

J2ME is nearly ubiquitous, barring the obvious iPhone/G1 exceptions. That means Bolt will run fine on your BlackBerry, S60 and Windows Mobile phones, among many others. [CrackBerry]

The wording is vague, and whether or not this holds up will remains to be seen, but the claim is probably not centered around the reformatting of web pages, as described elsewhere in the patent and below.

The patent abstract is as follows:

A method and apparatus of simplified navigation. A web page is provided having a link to a sister site. The sister site facilitates simplified navigation. Pages from the sister site are served responsive to actuation of the sister site link. In one embodiment, the sister site includes matrix pages to permit matrix navigation.

Further reading, along with the patent's crappy mockup (above), helped confirm what looked obvious from the above description: Gottfurcht is suing Apple because they think they hold a patent on the entire mobile web. Never mind the fact that the iPhone was touted as the first phone not to need mobile-optimized websites — even if the iPhone only visited stripped-down WAP sites, that would have almost nothing to do with the iPhone itself. [Reuters and The Register]

Opera Mini is notable for its practice of first loading your requested page on its own servers, which compress the pages and images before squirting it out to your phone over the network for quicker load times. And speed is definitely its forté on the G1—on T-Mobile's 3G network in NYC, pages like the New York Times, ESPN and Gizmodo all loaded with only a second or two of "Processing" delay. Granted, what you see are horizontal lines instead of text and a few shaded boxes instead of images, but zooming in doesn't cause any additional loading delay, except for some images. Zooming is pretty easy with a double tap or trackball click, and it works just like it does in other version of the browser. Hitting the G1's "back" button zooms you back out, which is unintuitive at first but ends up making sense.

Javascript sites that have lots of dynamically loading bits, even those optimized for smartphone browsers like Google Reader or Gmail, will often revert back to their more dumbed down static HTML versions. It's hard to find a page that loads completely bork-tastically though, as all of the pages we used in the Battlemodo loaded without any problems. No Flash, obviously, but YouTube's non-mobile front page still loads as you would expect.

As far as betas go, it's not terrible, but text entry fields have a strange bug which results in them taking up the entire screen (as you can see in the gallery), and the only way to go back is to press the "Menu" button and close out the form. So while you probably wouldn't want to switch to Opera for all of your browsing—it's a great backup to have for a quick load of a newspaper site or anything else fairly simple, especially if your connection isn't great.

Before 2007, using the internet on your phone would make you want to kill yourself, if you were dumb enough to believe the crap splattered across that tiny screen even was the "internet." But the combination of increased bandwidth and better mobile software means that more phones really are promising to deliver the real internet, in living color. We tested eight different browsers, and while some put smiles on our faces, others proved that rendering HTML correctly is a far cry from actually giving you an awesome web experience. And what about 3G vs. Wi-Fi? Everything the carriers have told you is a lie. This is the true state of mobile web.

Before we give you the rundown of each of the most prevalent mobile browsers, here's how they all stacked up in a timed test of how fast (and how well) they could render websites, chosen for their diversity and particular challenges:

CHART KEY: Number value is time for complete page load in seconds; page rendering is rated from "Fail" to "Excellent" for each; and the color (red, yellow, green) indicates overall performance taking into account both speed and rendering accuracy: Green = good overall, Red = fail overall.

This second chart runs through the same procedure with all of the phones that had Wi-Fi options:

It's a pretty daunting pile of numbers, so let's break it down into standard prose, rating each browser as we go:
Android
A fast, smart mobile browser based on WebKit. It tackles most sites with (almost) unrivaled grace and speed. Panning and zooming could be smoother and more responsive, but with a ton of options for getting around a page—various touch methods and the trackball—few sites will be challenging to zip around. The only thing we really miss is multitouch for zoom. Buttons just aren't a very elegant or precise solution, and while the whole-page magnifying glass technique is nice, we'd love something a bit more refined. Overall though, we're happy campers on Android's browser. Grade: B+

BlackBerry Bold
Leaps and bounds ahead of the browser BlackBerry users have put up with for years, it renders most pages correctly, even if scripts give it a conniption fit (hence its long load times for Wikipedia and the WSJ). It uses the standard "click to zoom" metaphor, which works well enough, though getting around a page with the trackball can be kind of a work out for you thumb. The Column View, which squeezes a whole page into a single column, is fairly convenient and makes it easier to get around wider pages, even if it doesn't work equally as well on every site (nice on Wikipedia, ugly on Giz). Hopefully they fix the script performance in the Storm, which is using an updated version of the Bold's browser. We humbly suggest they ditch their home-baked browser for one based on WebKit, which would help out there. Grade: B-/C+

iPhone
What can we say? It's still got the best mobile browser around. It crushes basically everything but Android's browser—which is also based on WebKit—in speed and outclasses its still classy brother-from-another-mother (and everyone else) with the ease and elegance of its multitouch zooming. Some pages still give it fits, and it's missing Flash support, but it really does deliver an unrivaled mobile web experience. We love it, but make no mistake we're eagerly waiting for something better. (Mobile Firefox? Is it you?) Grade: A-

Nokia E71 Symbian S60
Hey look, another web browser with WebKit guts! It doesn't perform quite as well as Android's or iPhone's iteration where speed or render accuracy are concerned (can any Symbian nuts explain why?), but it does a serviceable job. The big thing it has going for it is Flash Lite 3 support, though performance there is kinda assy and memory intensive. Navigation is tougher with the E71's d-pad than with a trackball, but the whole page magnifying approach makes it easy enough to get around (too bad you have to dig through a menu or two to get to it). Not bad, but short of excellent. Grade: B-

Internet Explorer on Windows Mobile
Jesus Christ. This is a joke, right Microsoft? Hahaha. No really, this is the worst smartphone browser on the planet. It couldn't render its way out of an ASCII-art paper bag. It totally screwed up every single test page, except for Wikipedia, which it only mostly screwed up. Good luck navigating a page if you're granted the miraculous occurrence of it being rendered in a state that's usable. Grade: F-

Opera Mobile on Windows Mobile
Microsoft's own intentions notwithstanding, you can use the internet on a Windows Mobile phone. You just need Opera Mobile. It's kind of hobbled by Windows Mobile's assy performance, but it usually gets the job done. Not as quickly or always as accurately as its WebKit rivals, but it's definitely usable. Interestingly, it benefits more from the extra bandwidth offered by Wi-Fi than the WebKit browsers do. Menu-based zoom is annoying and imprecise. Touch-based panning worked okay, though a little laggy. We mostly navigated with the Samsung Epix's optical cursor, which worked pretty well, somewhere in between a d-pad and a trackball. Grade: C

Sprint Instinct
Holy CRAP. This is not the painfully lousy browser the Instinct shipped with not by a long shot. The original was slow and fairly feeble, even if it was the head of its (dumbphone) class. The new 1.1 browser really is a life-changing upgrade. It suffers in the chart because it's much slower than most other browsers, and zooming is still clumsy, but once the page loads, it's much smoother to pan and actually move around. I got a bit annoyed that it lied about pageload time, hanging at the last 2 percent of the status bar for half the load, but it usually gets things right. This is the best non-smartphone browser you can get. Grade: C+

LG Dare
Like the Instinct, the Dare proves you can actually get a usable browsing experience on a feature phone. It's a little nimbler at loading pages than its Korean blood rival, but the reason it ultimately posts lower marks than the Instinct is that it buckles way more easily under a moderate to heavy pageload, turning it into an unresponsive picture of the website you were trying to look at. Still, it renders most pages fairly accurately, and we like the sliding zoom scroll bar, at least in theory, since it seems like an intuitive way to deal with the zoom issue. Unfortunately, it works more like a glorified pair of buttons. (Note: I don't think the speed was actually a piddly 300 Kbps—I think it just had a problem dealing with DSL Reports' mobile speedtest, even though it's text-based for the dumbest of phones.) Grade: C

Methodology
We tested every browser only using the full—not mobile—versions of selected sites, over 3G and, whenever possible, Wi-Fi. All scripts were turned on, and the cache was cleared before each round of testing. We took the average of a series of five sequential speedtests to give us an idea of the bandwidth we're dealing with, and timed how long it took to completely load a site according to each browser's progress bar. We assessed whether or not it rendered the page correctly, on a scale ranging from "excellent" to "good" (a couple things out of place) to "utter fail" (I've seen prettier train wrecks).

A few additional issues to note: Internet Explorer would not work on Wi-Fi. Opera yes, our Skyfire install, yes, Internet Exploder, no. (Samsung suggested it might be because of Opera.) We didn't pursue the matter because of how IE did in the 3G tests: A page that looks like a pile of blended dog poo is going to look like that no matter how much faster it loads. Sprint's updated Instinct and Verizon's Dare, which we included as best-of-class examples of feature phones, don't have Wi-Fi capabilities. We left out Opera Mini and Skyfire, since they both leave most of the hard work to servers which essentially spit out a kind of image file—besides, we don't think this kind of internet-by-proxy browser will be around for much longer.

The Big Gulp
Remember our mantra it's code that counts? It's true for mobile internet too. An awesome browser can make up for a mediocre network, but a terrible browser delivers a crappy experience no matter how great the network is. It's all about the browser. As it stands, WebKit is clearly the best thing going, but even then, software implementation matters, or Nokia would deliver as good a performance as Android and iPhone. Proving the point, it's striking how little Wi-Fi actually boosted speed beyond 3G—hell, WebKit browsers on 3G slid past some of the others that were running on Wi-Fi.

Another thing to note is that the zoom metaphor is a tricky thing to nail. Buttons are too brutish, the magnifying glass is imprecise. Multitouch seems to be the best way to handle zooming in and out in a way that's intuitive and precise. Hopefully we'll see other developers start to use multitouch interfaces in touchscreen phones (*cough*ANDROID!*cough*).

As much as this blow-by-blow battlemodo shows you all the problems we encountered, the big picture is that really, mobile web is pretty dandy right now, and getting dandier. It could be more reliable, faster, maybe a little more versatile, but for the most part, yes, you can access the internet on your phone. Compared to just two years ago, that's really saying something. We can't wait to see what it'll look like in two years. Maybe Internet Exploder will actually work. Nah, that's a little too sci-fi.

As you can see on the left, page rendering still isn't quite at Mobile Safari or Opera levels, but it's a massive improvement over IE5. Inertial scrolling is solid, and the (limited) flash support is a pleasant surprise. Text wrap and zooming haven't been fully sorted out yet, so pulling out on a page often leaves paragraphs wrapped for a higher zoom level.

If these problems are addressed — and I fully expect them to be — Microsoft could have a winner on its hands. Even as is, it's a colossal step forward for Mobile IE, and one that will at minimum bring it into the same generation as its competitors. [MSDN via Slashphone]

* Improved fidelity (support for full fidelity desktop rendering)
* Layout fixes to accommodate a mobile screen (text wrap)
* Enhanced Script and AJAX support (Jscript v5.7 from Internet Explorer 8)
* Improved multimedia experience (Adobe Flash Lite 3.1 for Adobe Flash content)
* Deeper integration with search
* Enhanced cursor navigation model
* Touch and gesture support – pan support
* Multiple zoom levels
* Easy switching between mobile / desktop versions of sites by specifying UA strings.