Skyfire beta now open

[WelshBloke]

Woot!!

Seems pretty good so far although havent used it a lot.

Link

 

[DnetMHZ]

Does it do flash?

 

[WelshBloke]

Not had much time to play but I just went to adobe.com and seems to work fine. 😀

 

[TKE899]

Yup flash and java support, and this has been open beta for a couple months now. Love it. Best Windows Mobile Browser available.

 

[gorcorps]

Dammit, I've used WM phones for my last 3 phones and now that I finally switched to blackberry the WM phones get a badass browser. Boo-urns

 

[blurredvision]

Could I use this on my Eternity? Or is it WM-only?

 

[WelshBloke]

Originally posted by: blurredvision
Could I use this on my Eternity? Or is it WM-only?

WM and Symbian. List of supported symbian phones at skyfire site.

 

[brikis98]

I didn't have too much time, but tried it out during a 5 minute lull at work on my Sony Ericsson X1:

* First, it wouldn't run at all: the X1's screen is WVGA (800x480) and Skyfire only supports up to VGA (640x480).
* Using a WVGA hack from xda-developers, I was able to start the program up with 160 pixels of the screen staying black.
* Page load times were relatively quick and overall, websites looked pretty good, essentially identical to what you get on desktop.
* The UI of skyfire is decent, roughly equivalent to Opera, although still far behind Safari.
* From a quick test, Flash did indeed work on Youtube. The video seemed smooth, though I didn't watch for long.
* The one issue I saw - probably just a bug in this beta - is that occasionally, pages just wouldn't load on the first or second try. For example, you'd type in cnn.com, push enter, it would start loading... and then nothing would happen. Click on a youtube link, the progress bar would start filling up... but nothing would appear. After one or two retries, it would always work, but it's clearly an issue.

 

[frostedflakes]

Do the Anandtech forums work for anybody else? I think I tried an earlier beta and kept on getting errors when trying to load the forum index.

Not a bad browser, but I prefer Opera for browsing, and I can use youtubeplay to watch YouTube videos. I think my phone just isn't fast enough to take full advantage of the browser, rendering is kind of slow and flash pages bog down pretty bad.