On Friday, I came home from work to a pleasant, but unexpected, surprise.  The first shot in the mobile browser wars had landed squarely in my lap.   Peter has been doing a great job of featuring the beginnings of this brewing storm.  Last week, three mobile web browsers were all unveiled virtually on top of each other: Skyfire, the latest Netfront, and Opera 9.5.  On top of that, Firefox is expected to have a mobile offering soon.  Needless to say, there soon should be no need for anyone to be stuck complaining about PIE again.  Anyway, getting back to my Friday surprise, I was thrilled to have received an email from the Skyfire team inviting me to join the early private Beta of the new Skyfire browser, which Patrick introduced to you last week

On Saturday, Peter brought you his first look at the latest Netfront, and it does look excellent.  Today, I want to shift to the second front of the browser war: Skyfire.   I have not had time to test it enough to call this a full review, but I did want to give you a few initial impressions.

Skyfire is unique in that none of the data resides on your device.  Instead, everything is located on a remote server, which is accessed by your device.  As Dieter Bohn noted over at WMExperts, there are some pros and cons to this server side approach:

So the benefit of having 90% of the work on a server is you get snappy rendering, full support for basically any web standard, and fast downloads. You get the desktop browser pushed out to your phone.

The downside – that server best stay up, hey? It also best keep your data secure and private (SkyFire says that’s been their #1 priority, even in their early betas). Lastly, though, server’s ain’t free. SkyFire hasn’t settled on a pricing model yet, but they’re leaning towards ads before subscriptions to keep the service free. The company was keen to show me their portal – which pulls from multiple search engines – so that’s probably going to be part of the model.

OK.  Enough about the technical stuff, let’s take a look at the software. 

I found the homepage to be a bit spartan, though it did have a very clean look.  There are three main tabs: Featured, Bookmarks, and History, along with a built-in search window.  The Featured tab has text links to some of the major news, sports, social web, shopping and video sites.  I was pretty impressed by the selection of links contained here, which included: CNN, BBC, ESPN, Sports Illustrated, FaceBook, YouTube, eBay, and Amazon to name just a few.  Presumably, this list of built-in sites will only continue to grow as Skyfire nears its release. 

What was surprising to me was the fact that these were only text links, and not thumbnails or images.  Since this is all contained server side, there is no concern of eating up space on your device with unnecessary graphics.  As such, it seems like they could do a lot more with this.  Then again, since this is still a Beta, there is still plenty of time for them to work that out.

The other two tabs, Bookmarks and History are pretty self explanatory.  I was disappointed, however, to find that my PIE bookmarks did not automatically transfer over to Skyfire.  There should be a way to import them here, rather than making me input them all over again.

All right, so let’s take a look at a web page.  Here is what JAMM looks like in Skyfire.  As you can see, it is taking me to the full JAMM site, not the mobile site.  The formatting is exactly the same as the actual page.  Only smaller.  When you first reach a page, it is sized to pretty well fit the screen.   The other thing you will notice is that there are no scrollbars.  I can’t show this to you in a screenshot, but it has fantastic finger control.  Just hold your finger on the screen and move it around.  Skyfire will scroll right along with your finger, in any direction.  This is fantastic. 

In this view, though, while you can read headlines and see the images, it is pretty much impossible to read the text.  This is where the zoom feature comes in.

To zoom, just tap the screen once and a gray box will appear.  This shows you the zoom area. 

Now, you can tap the plus and minus buttons to change the size of the zoom area.  Of course, the smaller the area you zoom, the easier the text will be to read.  On the other hand, make it too small and you will be forever scrolling. 

I loved this zoom idea.  But I do wish the box could be resized by dragging the corners.  This would allow you to more accurately custom size the zoom.  Also, the closer you zoom, the longer it will take to render the page. 

Oftentimes, when I was zoomed, I would find myself scrolling down a page only to be met by the now telltale checkerboard screen which tells me to slow down.  This is the server working to catch up with you.  And eventually it does.  More often than that, however, when you scroll, the page will be blurred for a moment as it renders the zoom. 

Of course being able to read is one thing.  But how about audio, video, and other multimedia content.  This is where Skyfire really starts to shine.  I was amazed by how well it did.  I played Yahoo videos as though I was sitting in front of my laptop.  When I went to the ESPN site, it immediately cued up the video and audio in the sidebar.  To really test this out, I headed over to check out my friend’s band, Progress Report.  Their video, "I Just Wanna Rock and Roll" is featured on Youtube.  Watching it on Skyfire worked even better than watching it on my laptop.  Since everything is maintained server side, there is no need to wait for downloads and buffering.  Take that PIE!

True to its word, I have not found anything I could do on Firefox that Skyfire could not handle.  When I first started using it, I was a little bit frustrated by the constant zooming in and out.  The more I used it, however, the more natural this became.  Of course, this is a Beta, so while there is a lot to like here, there is also still plenty of room for improvement.  I would love to see the home screen offer a more graphical interface.  I would also like to see the zoom feature become even easier to use, with draggable corners on the zoom square, or even a more Safari-like zoom feature.  The biggest problem I saw, however, was the effect this server side rendering had on the life of my battery.  A few times I inadvertently left my Mogul connected to Skyfire, and I could have watched my battery drain in what seemed like minutes.  They really will need to fix this if they expect Skyfire to become a useful browser.  One thing is clear, though.  The opening salvo in the browser wars has been fired.  Whether you consider this to be a direct hit or a warning shot, it clearly opens the door to a whole new browsing experience, giving you capabilities which have never been available before on a Windows Mobile device.

Skyfire is currently free, but is available only through a limited private Beta.  Head over here to sign up.

Related posts:

1. Skyfire Gets ‘Doesn’t Suck’ Endorsement from Gizmodo
2. Get Yer SkyFire Here!
3. Finally, Skyfire Web Browser, available for all!
4. Skyfire Finally Achieves Escape Velocity: Beta No More
5. Skyfire – ‘PC-Like’ Browsing on Windows Mobile?