Android to gain another browser: Skyfire

Holla! Whoop whoop! Time to get excited. Skyfire is coming to Android!

Mobile browsing has steadily gotten better over the last several years with better hardware and software teaming up. Regardless of what OS, processor, or type of display you have, the only thing that truly matters in mobile web browsing is the browser itself. Even today, most phones have pretty craptastic apps installed called “browsers”, with some manufacturers even going as far as to brag about the “HTML” aspect. Even with “HTML”, most standard browsers suck.

Truth be told, today we have several viable options that are worth a look, or two, or three. There’s the standards such as Mobile Safari on the iPhone and Mobile Chrome on Android, but those are more dependent on the OS. Instead, more “universal” browsers that are actually worth talking about include Opera Mini, Opera Mobile, Fennec, and SkyFire.

Opera Mini is an amazingly successful mobile browser that spans across hundreds of devices and offers fast speeds in a light footprint. Opera Mobile requires more powerful hardware, but still offers an even fuller featured browsing experience while on the go if not a slightly slower pace. Fennec is the new wonder browser that debuted on the Nokia N900, with plans to move onward to Android in the not too distant future. But the real reason we’re talking about mobile browsers today is Skyfire.

Skyfire, like Opera Mini users server-side compression technology to compress each and every page you browser before it actually gets to your phone. Doing that removes a solid 60%+ from your actual device’s data stream making your wait times and data usage much less — a very good thing. It’s already been highly talked up in it’s current Windows Mobile dressing for it’s speed, rending accuracy, and overall ease of use. Best of all (to some), it is 100% fully Flash compatible. Good news for Android users, it’s coming home.

In an announcement today, Skyfire announced that they have acquired Kolbysoft — the company which makes the Android “Steel” browser — in hopes to better develop a new Android browser.

According to Skyfire’s CEO:

By adding kolbysoft’s talent to Skyfire, we’ll be able to fuse the best of Skyfire’s famed cloud-computing multimedia capabilities with the Webkit browser movement to create a better hybrid model for Android. Steel has been the most acclaimed browser in the Android Marketplace, adding features atop Webkit. Together, we’ll be able to do so much more.

Don’t go waiting in any digital line to get early news on Skyfire’s new Android development as they’re still in the early stages. Now with Kolbysoft’s talent in the Android realm however, things should pick up. One last thing worth mentioning before we leave is that the Skyfire Android browser will run atop the WebKit rendering engine already used by the stock Android browser. Some may see this as a sour point. But, if Skyfire can work their magic in conjunction with the server-side compression technology, Skyfire for Android could be even better than Fennec for Android. Well, ok. Maybe I’m getting a little ahead of myself there.

Geeked?

Gizmodo > Skyfire