Mobile browsers: Worthy competitors
Browsers have always been an area of intense competition as software makers have battled to establish themselves as the gateway to the Internet. Over the years the likes of Mosaic, Netscape, Internet Explorer, Firefox, Opera and Safari have battled bitterly for supremacy in a market that never seems to lose its edge.
Ironically, it is a market which is completely commoditised meaning that virtually no-one pays a even a cent for the browser that they use. The riches to be reaped by makers from market dominance are far less obvious than pure selling price and are largely tied a wider attempt by software players to establish their brand within the IT consumer’s mind.
Over the past decade this battle has played out mostly on the desktop. But increasingly the focus is shifting to the mobile market as smartphones grow in popularity and mini-laptops make inroads into mainstream computing.
In most cases, particularly in the smartphone market, devices ship with their own particular browser. So Nokia has its browser, Sony Ericsson its version and the iPhone has its Safari browsers. But, as the market heats up, a growing number of other mobile-specific browsers are appearing for users to choose from. We look at some of these, including a few some that most users may never have heard of.
Opera Mini (http://www.opera.com/mini/)
One of the better and best known mobile browsers is Opera Mini. Opera Mini 4 is a Java client and runs on S60, Palm OS, BlackBerry, Windows Mobile devices as well as most other mobile phones that support Java. Most other mobile browsers are restricted to running on just one or two of the major operating systems or phone brands.
Besides running on just about every mobile device imaginable, Opera has another strength in its desktop-based sibling. Although only commanding about 1% market share, Opera has the ability to seamlessly share session information between the desktop and mobile versions of its browser. For users this means that even if they are suddenly pulled away from their desk they can carry on surfing the Internet on their mobile phone. There are many browsers that can sync bookmarks between browsers using a third party services but Opera’s native ability to do this is a real benefit. On most phones Opera is also able to save pages for later offline reading, as well as being able to synchronise Opera Notes between both mobile and desktop versions.
Fennec (https://wiki.mozilla.org/Mobile/Fennec)
Fennec is the code name for the Firefox mobile browser. The only real surprise in a mobile edition of Firefox is that the Mozilla Foundation has taken so long to develop it. While Internet Explorer, Safari and Opera have all jumped head-first into the mobile market, Firefox has all but ignored the opportunities in the mobile market.
Fennec – the name is from that of a small, nocturnal fox – is a stripped-down browser built with mobile touch screens in mind. Although it is a little late coming to the market, Fennec has something that no-one else does: An enormous Firefox extensions database that in all reality could be ported over to Fennec fairly quickly. With the array of extensions potentially available to it, Fennec stands more than a fighting chance of making headway in the market, despite most others having a head-start. And when it is more broadly available it can reliably be expected that hundreds of the existing extensions available for Firefox will be ported to Fennec. That is a challenge that Opera, Apple and others are going to find hard to match.
Although initially limited to the Nokia N810 devices, Fennec does now run on Windows Mobile devices as well. Fennec has a particularly appealing interface which has a horizontal orientation allowing toolbars to be swiped into and out of view.
Skyfire (http://www.skyfire.com)
One of the lesser-known mobile browsers is in fact one of the best. Skyfire runs on both Windows Mobile phones as well as on Nokia N- and E-series phones. The download for an E-series Nokia is just over 800KB and for a Windows Mobile touchscreen phone a slim 600KB+. Skyfire has two advantages: it is fast and it does its best to render web pages just as you would see them on a desktop PC. Which means that most, if not just about all, websites will work properly through Skyfire. That includes Flash based video on site such as YouTube which it plays live on the site. Most other mobile browsers hand video playing off to other third party applications rather than playing it in-line. On Nokia devices, however, Skyfire chooses to rather save video content but on Windows Mobile devices Skyfire will actually play the video content in-line just as a browser would on your desktop.
Just as with Opera and Fennec, Skyfire websites are rendered in full size but give the user the option to zoom and pan around the screen. There is also a SmartFit option that will automatically reformat the text on a zoomed area so that it will fit within the boundaries of the screen.
Skyfire is still in the early days of development and will, no doubt, find it very hard to break into the mobile browser market against stiff competition but it has enormous promise for users looking for a better mobile browsing experience.
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