| Microsoft pulls plug on mobile browsing experiment |
Sep. 26, 2008
 In its effort to provide better web browsing on Windows Mobile devices, Microsoft might have lost a battle, but has won the war. That's what the company seems to be saying as it pulls the plug on Deepfish, a experimental web browser from Microsoft Live Labs.
Deepfish, made available for download during a brief period last year, was "aimed at preserving the rich layout and full form of documents on mobile devices, while providing novel ways of effectively navigating that content on small screens," according to Microsoft. It pioneered a variety of features that are starting to become common on other Windows Mobile browsers, including the following:- Pages opened in a zoomed-out view, formatted as they would be on a desktop browser. Users could zoom into specified areas via a selection rectangle, and pan around pages at will.
- A lightweight browser client was paired with server-based proxies that did most of the processing. Load times and responsiveness were improved because servers streamed only the data being viewed at any particular moment.
Popularized by the Safari web browser included with Apple's iPhone, zooming and panning of web pages is now included in a variety of Windows Mobile browsers, including Opera Software's Opera Mobile 9.5, Torch Mobile's Iris Browser, and Skyfire Labs' Skyfire. Notably, Skyfire also employs the proxy server-based browsing method, and has been hailed as the fastest of Windows Mobile browsers. Skyfire is even fully compatible with technologies such as asynchronous Javascript and XML (AJAX), Java, Adobe Flash, and Microsoft's own Silverlight, claims Skyfire Labs.
Deepfish was touted as enabling mobile access to standard Web pages
Deepfish, illustrated above, never gained support for AJAX, cookies, or ActiveX controls, much less multimedia. Now, anyone who downloaded the Deepfish client will find that it ceases working completely at the end of the month. That's because Microsoft is pulling the plug on the Deepfish proxy servers on Sep. 31, according to the company's Live Labs blog.
The Live Labs team says in its posting, "When we began working on Deepfish [in 2006], we set out to prove our theory that there was an unmet demand for a better mobile browsing experience than what was available. It wasn't our intent to create a full browser for the preview, but rather simply demonstrate that a novel and simple new user experience was the best way to achieve that. And now, thanks in part to Deepfish, many better alternatives are emerging."
Though it naturally goes unsaid in the above posting, Microsoft's own Internet Explorer has continued to lag behind the other browser alternatives for Windows Mobile. However, as per an announcement made last April, Internet Explorer will be updated later this year to offer full-screen web browsing, plus Flash and Silverlight support, according to Microsoft.
According to screen shots leaked this week on the website the::unwired, the new version of Internet Explorer will also allow users to toggle from webpages specially tailored for mobile devices, to the versions devised for desktop web browsers. Such a feature already exists in the alternative Windows Mobile web browsers mentioned earlier.
Further information
To see Microsoft's posting about the end of Deepfish, view the company's Live Labs blog, here. To see leaked screen shots of the new Internet Explorer for Windows Mobile, see the::unwired, here.
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