Items tagged with skyfire
A few years ago, a lot of iPhone users were frustrated by Apple's refusal to allow apps into the App Store that duplicated the efforts of apps that were built into iOS. Thankfully, Apple has bent a bit on that over the years, and while there's still no good way to remove the Stocks app from your device, and still no great third-party solution to the Mail app, at least the browsing arena has some competition. The version of Mobile Safari on Apple's iPad is easily one of the most robust mobile browsers in existence. The original Mobile Safari really set the bar for smartphone browsers when introduced on the iPhone. But times have changed, and Mobile Safari doesn't have the commanding lead that...
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Promises, promises. Can it deliver?The technical trick of Skyfire is that it's a proxy browser. The Skyfire app itself isn't a full browser. Instead, big Skyfire servers elsewhere process Web pages, including all the media and browser formats -- like Flash, Java, and Ajax -- that a normal desktop browser would handle but that most phones can't. Then it streams data to phones, which the mobile half of Skyfire displays. To the end user, it looks like a browser, but the mobile app is just one part of the product.This means that Skyfire can do things on mobile phones that mobile browsers, including Safari and Opera, cannot, at least not without bogging down the phone. The danger is that the...
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