MWC: Mobile browser Skyfire announces a major change of direction with Android and WebKit

In the world of mobile browsers, one of the fastest options is Skyfire. It’s an independent mobile browser, meaning that unlike the mobile versions of Opera or Firefox, it has no stable on-line version backing it up. In an interview at Mobile World Congress, Skyfire CEO Jeffrey Glueck told GoMo about a major shift in direction that will be coming our way soon. Not only is it releasing a version for Android, but it will be integrating elements from the open source WebKit browser engine.

What is Skyfire?

Skyfire is an extremely light weight mobile browser that has two major strengths. First, it side-loads everything from the Skyfire server. What that means is that when you request a web page through Skyfire, it loads that web page on its own servers first – faster than your phone ever could. Then it optimises that page to display the best on your particular model of mobile device. THEN it sends it to your phone. The end result is that it does all the crunchy work instead of your phone, meaning a much faster load time on your device (plus smaller data charges because it has been compressed). The second strength is its dedication to rich media – Skyfire displays a range of video files that other mobile browsers simply can’t. It’s one of the few browsers that will actually play Flash video – something even the iPad refuses to do. Skyfire is also incredibly streamlined – the entire browser is around half a megabyte, so it’s no problem to download and install on even older devices.

Sounds good!

It does! But for all its strengths, a big problem with Skyfire has always been that it was available for only a narrow field of mobile operating systems. Ok, one of those OSs is S60 – the most populous mobile browser in the world. But the other is the increasingly unpopular Windows Mobile 5 and 6. And while there are a lot of S60 devices around, they’re not used to browse the internet very often. The most used device for internet browsing is the iPhone. But increasingly, Android devices are being used to browse the web. So creating a browser for Android is a smart move. After all, Skyfire’s major competition isn’t browsers like Opera – it’s the browsers that come embedded on mobile web devices when they’re taken out of the box.

But along with the Android announcement comes the one about WebKit. Jeffrey Glueck was very cagey about this, and didn’t release any more details than absolutely necessary. But what is know is this: Skyfire has acquired a company called Kolbysoft that specialises in WebKit mobile browsing software. Now, this was a necessary step to getting a browser onto Android, because Android operates one of the most prominent WebKit variants. But WebKit is also gathering a lot of momentum in general. It’s a strong rendering engine, and Skyifire claims that a lot of large companies have said that WebKit is their chosen engine moving forward.

Now, it’s important to restate here that Skyfire is a server-side process. It’s a cloud computing solution and always has been – it has never had its own mobile rendering engine, preferring to remain agnostic at that level. But this announcement means that Skyfire will be creating a hybrid – the best of webkit native rendering combined with Skyfire server-side assist.

And that is all the detail I could get. Jeffrey remained resolutely mysterious on any other details.

That’s it?

Well there was one other thing he brought up that I found very interesting, though it wasn’t to do with WebKit. Apparently a number of larger tech companies have approached Skyfire about licensing out parts of its technology to be used in other mobile browsers. I got the impression that this was something Skyfire wasn’t really expecting to happen, but it has opened up intriguing possibilities for a large new revenue stream for them.