“Skyfire, which aims to give a PC-like browsing experience on your phone, is now available as a limited access beta for S60. Skyfire uses compression and a proxy-based technology to deliver full featured (Flash 9, Quicktime, Java, AJAX) web pages to phones. Their aim is to deliver exactly the same page to your phone that you would see on your PC. We’ve got 100 instant access beta invitations to give away for our US readers. Read on for more details.Skyfire works by having a proxy server sit between your browsing and the Internet. When you load a web page you send a request to Skyfire servers. Skyfire uses their proprietary technology, part of which is built on top of Mozilla’s Firefox, to load the requested page and then sends it to your phone in a compressed Skyfire format. The Skyfire client running on the phone interprets this format and shows you the web page. A crucial extra compared to other proxy based browsers (e.g. Opera Mini) is the ability to fully interact with a page (e.g. AJAX functions, as used by many Web 2.0 sites).Skyfire’s technology works by running a heavily customised version of Firefox on the Skyfire server which does your browsing for you. Once it has accessed a page, the Skyfire server sends a version of the page to the Skyfire application running on your phone. The server does most of the hard (and resource intensive) work, leaving your phone to do basic rendering, which makes for faster browsing. And because the browser copy running on the server is on a PC it is able to handle almost any web page including those that use technologies like Flash, Java, Quicktime or AJAX. These are areas where traditional mobile browsers are weak. Moreover, the pages will look the same as they do on a PC because effectively you are using a PC browser.” Read more here:
