Every Windows Mobile smartphone has Pocket Internet Explorer with basic browsing capabilities. This is not enough for many users, so they buy Opera Mobile. Additionaly, there is Opera Mini, NetFront and some others. But this year, several developers started writing an own browser for Windows Mobile. While Wake3 and Torch Mobile use the WebKit engine, the SkyFire developers decided to take Gecko, the Firefox engine, which is well-known to use a lot of memory and thus only plays an important role on desktop computers or the new UMPCs / MIDs.
Torch Mobile - Iris Browser
Iris Browser is like a small Safari, which also has the WebKit engine. At the moment, it is only a public beta. I tried version 1.0.9 some months ago, which was not very stable. However, it could handle all pages I opened and was not too slow. There is no Flash support, but it is compatible to plugin files which use the Netscape API and the homepage of the developer mentions a Flash plugin.
This morning, the updating service installed version 1.0.13. It didn’t crash, but on one big site, the phone didn’t react for about one minute. After that, it worked again. But I have to mention that the phone’s memory was almost full, so this may have caused the problem.
My opinion: Interesting browser with nice features (Tabbed Browsing, graphical effects, zooming), but not stable enough yet. If there is a plugin which can show Flash animations (or other plugins), the developer should write a manual how to install them. So, if you want a good browser, give it a try, perhaps it runs better on your phone.
Skyfire
Skyfire’s technology can be compared to Opera Mini. It also uses a proxy server which does the job of the rendering engine. It shows the “image” which has been rendered on a Windows XP server with Firefox 2.0. This way makes the use of the Gecko engine possible, which - in my opinion - renders some sites a bit clearer than WebKit. One negative aspect of this technology is that you cannot access intranet sites, another one is, that many people are worried about their data protection. But on the other side, you will probably find no site you the browser has problems with. Flash 9, QuickTime and Java belong to supported contents.
Unfortunately, Skyfire is still a beta version in a closed testing program and, according to their homepage, only availible for users with a smartphone in the US.
The user agent string is
Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1, en-US; rv: 1.8.1.16) Gecko/2007112718 Firefox/2.0.0.16
My opinion: The basic features of the recent version work correctly and stable on my phone. I can also access YouTube and watch videos (with sound). This browser might be one of the best Windows Mobile browsers should be released to the public - if you are interested, you should sign up for the next beta program.
