SON SON
Microsoft Corp. has developed a next-generation mobile browser, Deepfish, whose aim is to render web pages with similar quality to a desktop system. The company has made the announcement at the ETech conference in San Diego, Calif., this Wednesday.
Deepfish is a new approach to mobile browsing: instead of trying to fit the page to the mobile screen, losing some of the original layout and quality, it tries to maintain the full-form page and its interface enables you to zoom in and out. The page’s layout is preserved, so navigation menus, lists of search results of news headlines and other element can be browsed simply, the team said. In other browsers, such material might have been “bent so thoroughly to fit the usual single column layout that they were no longer legible,” the Live Labs team wrote.
“Think about your mobile browsing experience today,” Gary William Flake, director of Microsoft Live Labs, said in a written statement. “It’s often less than intuitive, the pages don’t look like what you’ve come to expect on the desktop and it takes a long time for a page to load. Deepfish aims to solve that problem.”
The software also makes it faster to browse the web on a mobile device, Flake said. “On current mobile browsers, it can typically take up to a minute or more for a web page to render,” he said. Because Deepfish only loads the part of the page a user is interested in, it can make page-load times much faster. “Detailed information is only retrieved as needed or in the background.”
Unlike ZenZui’s tiled interface, also licensed from Microsoft Labs, Deepfish presents pages in a familiar format and does not require the web developer or publisher to make any changes. This preview release is far from complete, lacking features such as ActiveX controls, AJAX, cookies and Javascript. Its quality and features aren’t even beta quality yet.
The Microsoft Live Labs team said in a statement that the preview was available for download for Windows Mobile 5.0 and higher devices, with a limited number of slots available that will be distributed on a first-come, first-serve basis. For now, the testing slots have been overregistered, but users can still queue up for future releases.
Meanwhile, some are wondering about the similarity between this promising prototype technology from Microsoft and the Safari browser on the Apple iPhone.