[General Topics] Menneisyys:
Conformance tests:

(Note that most of these tests – except the ones that need some interaction with the client: for example, file up/download – produce exactly the same results as with the desktop version of Firefox. I, to be on the safe side, re-tested them.)

File download: didn’t download the 7.5M test file in 15 minutes - download has just stalled.

File upload: doesn’t work (the control is shown but it doesn’t work)

Compliance tests:

The new W3C test: not very bad

As you’ll also see, based on this and the User-Agent header, the engine clearly uses Firefox 2.0.0.11. I’ve tested this with the desktop 2.0.0.13 version (3b5 delivers worse results as can be seen in HERE) and got exactly the same results

Incidentally, I’ve also tested the just-released 3.0rc1 of Firefox to see whether it has fixed the compliance issues of the betas. The result is HERE and shows it is definitely better than the 3.0 betas – but not better than the 2.0.0.11+ series.)

Macromedia / Adobe Flash: works; client-server connection, much-much faster than in DeepFish / Thunderhawk animation.

As can be seen, even YouTube works. Sound didn’t work on my HTC Universal; other people at XDA-Developers, on the other hand, reported it working.

Frame tests (see the chart of my Bible for more info):

Maximal number of sub-framesets?: 2.html was the first to work; 1.html still didn’t. Pretty good, though, compared to the other browsers.

Max. number of parallel frames: no restriction, it seems

Frame boundaries aren’t settable; a frame in a (separate) tab / window isn’t viewable either.

Iframe support: works

Dynamic HTML forms / explicit form field disabling: supported

WAP: not supported

Acid2 test: much better than that of IEM

Java Applets: supported. A demo screenshot of the Animator Applet is HERE. Another demo; now, with Live Feedback ImageMap is HERE.

Incidentally, it’s worth noting the JPEG compression effects (blocks), which also show SkyFire uses exactly the same client/server model as Thunderhawk.

Ajax:

The two pages linked from AJAX: Getting Started: works

Google Image Labeler: works

Haven’t tested: caching (it has no caching, as with all the other client/server browsers not using for example separate images like Opera Mini or Thunderhawk). I haven’t tested full page loading speed (with my standard PPCMag test) either as the browser only receives the first about two pages upon loading a page; therefore, it’s impossible to benchmark the loading of the full page.

HTTP Headers: (also see THIS for the why’s of including them in here)

User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.8.1.11) Gecko/2007112718 Firefox/2.0.0.11

Accept: text/xml,application/xml,application/xhtml+xml,text/html;q=0.9,text/plain;q=0.8,image/png,*/*;q=0.5

Accept-Language: en-us,en;q=0.5

Accept-Encoding: gzip,deflate

Accept-Charset: ISO-8859-1,utf-8;q=0.7,*;q=0.7

Keep-Alive: 300

X-Skyfire-Version: THNWD_xxx.xxx.fixme

X-Skyfire-Screen: 240,320,240,296

X-Skyfire-Phone: Phone with crappy default browser # touchscreen

Via: 1.1 skyadmin.sjc1.skyfire.com:3128 (squid/2.6.STABLE6)

X-Forwarded-For: 10.100.120.119

Cache-Control: max-age=259200

Connection: keep-alive

Verdict

Client/server-based and, as opposed to the text-based Opera Mini and Thunderhawk, image transfer-based clients will always have the same advantages over purely client-based ones; most importantly, having access to a desktop Web browser on the server, with even Java applet support. The same stands for the disadvantages: they will always exhibit the same problems, pretty much independent of the time and effort spent on making them as sophisticated as possible.

Fortunately, SkyFire behaves pretty well in this respect. While it, in my opinion, hardly can be called a decent alternative to Opera Mini or Mobile (it still has a LOT of problems – for example, the unacceptably high idle (!) CPU usage – to fix and, again, the client/server image transfer-based networking model is pretty much restricted), it’s already much better than DeepFish has ever been and it even beats the native Pocket PC version of Thunderhawk in many respects (when it comes to, for example, Flash support). It is also much better than (some of – I can only speak about the ones that I’ve thoroughly tested at, say, MWC) the non-Windows Mobile-based mobile Web browser solutions like PocketSurfer 2.

While, I’m afraid, because of the networking model’s huge restrictions, it will never match „lightweight” browsers like Opera Mini or even Opera Mobile, it’s still nice to see there is some serious development producing even newer Web browsers.