In the age of streaming everything, mobile browsers are definitely not having an easy time keeping up. At best, streaming a video to an OEM smartphone browser is a complete mess; at worst, it’s impossible. Enter Skyfire, a third-party browser we’ve covered here on BGR before and the best way to describe it might be to quote the company’s homepage pitch: “Watch any video, listen to any music, stay connected with friends, browse whatever you want.” Of course that’s a bit of a reach but Skyfire does multimedia processing on the server side, opening up a whole new range of sites and services that become accessible – Hulu, YouTube, Last.fm, the Hype Machine and so on. Skyfire today announced the availability of version 0.9 of its mobile browser which includes tons of tweaks and new functionality:
- New start page – integrated RSS, Facebook, Twitter, etc
- Improved readability – adaptive font sizes, contextual zoom, etc
- Widescreen / hi-res support – Handsets such as the XPERIA X1, Samsung Omnia and Nokia N80 are now supported
- Improved Superbar – improved auto-suggestions
- Multimedia downloads – there is now an option to download audio or video files streamed by Skyfire
- Updated page rendering – faster page loads, better zoom
- Updated plugins – Flash 10, Silverlight 2.0 and newest Quicktime are all now supported
There are also a variety of version-specific improvements and tweaks such as better email link handling in Windows Mobile and improved battery life for the Symbian version. Conclusion: Current users, update ASAP. New users, catch up.
