| Skyfire trounces competitors in mobile browser comparo |
Jul. 24, 2008
 An interesting blog post by Laptop Magazine's Todd Haselton compares the Safari web browser on Apple's iPhone to two Windows Mobile browsers -- Skyfire and Opera Mobile 9.5. According to his tests, Safari is generally faster than Opera Mobile, but Skyfire is dramatically faster than both.
(Click here for a larger view of Laptop Magazine's mobile browser showdown)
Writes Haselton, "The mobile Internet Explorer Web browser you get on Windows Mobile smart phones is less than desirable. It usually directs you to a mobile Web site instead of the full-blown interactive ones that we access on our computers. Sure, Microsoft has announced support for Silverlight and Flash in a new version of mobile IE by the end of the year, but we're in the heat of the summer and December still seems light years away."
So, rather than wait for the updated Internet Explorer, Hasleton decided to benchmark Apple's ballyhooed Safari, running on the iPhone 3G, against Opera Software's newly released Opera Mobile 9.5, running on a Windows Mobile-based AT&T Tilt. As a wild card, he threw in Skyfire, which has been in limited beta since its January announcement.
Unlike the other two browsers, Skyfire's browser leans on pre-rendering proxy servers hosted by Skyfire Labs. These do the "heavy lifting" of error correction, document object modeling, and page rendering -- then send the results to a phone as images.
So does Skyfire get results? Before answering that, let's note that Haselton's benchmarks are the first true apples-to-windows comparison of mobile web browser performance we've seen. That's because both the Tilt and the iPhone 3G were using AT&T's 3G cellular network, taking connectivity out of the equation as a variable.
As you'll read in the blog post, Skyfire did indeed blow the other two web browsers away. Not only capable of supporting Flash 9, Java, and QuickTime video playback, it also loaded every web site tested in nine seconds or fewer. In contrast, Opera Mobile 9.5 took up to 60 seconds to load pages, and Safari took as long as 54 seconds.
Haselton said "Skyfire loads pages faster than anything we've ever come across, and its support for robust Web pages makes us feel like we took our computer's browser and put it on a 3-inch screen." Since pages are downloaded as images, the process of entering text into forms is more complicated on Skyfire than with other browsers. But, "We have not had any issue regarding the text entry troubles that some users reported," he added.
Haselton said his dream browser would be Skyfire, running on the iPhone, or at least on another device with a larger screen than the Tilt. But, he had kind words for Opera and Safari too, despite their slower speed.
Safari, for example, was lauded for ease of zooming, and for the way it changes a page's orientation from portrait to landscape at the behest of the iPhone's accelerometer. Opera was praised for the way it allows saving pages and images, then browsing them later even in areas where there is no cellular signal.
To read the complete benchmark results, and view videos of all three browsers in operation, see the Laptop blog posting, here.
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