Microsoft's new Mobile Browser: Deepfish

[NatCh]

Hoping to Make a Splash in the Mobile Browsing Pond


Apparently MicroSoft sees its next big opportunity in the Mobile arena. They're looking to capture part of the market with a browser that doesn't rely on webpages being formated for the mobile device. Sounds like a grand idea to me.

According to Microsoft, Deepfish is a new type of mobile information browsing experience, aimed at preserving the rich layout and full form of documents on mobile devices while providing novel ways of effectively navigating that content on small screens. Deepfish's unique interface enables you to zoom in and out of page, quickly getting to the areas you are interested in without screen length after screen length of scrolling. And because the layout is preserved, navigation menus, lists of search results or news headlines, and other elements that might have been bent so thoroughly to fit the usual single column layout that they were no longer legible can now be browsed simply and easily. A consequence of Deepfish's multi-resolution approach to browsing pages is that it loads a thumbnail of pages initially and then only what is needed for more detail when requested or in the background as you browse the initial the view, resulting in substantially quicker load times for most pages.

But lest you get the mistaken notion that MicroSoft wants to play well with others:

Of course, Deepfish will only be available for Windows Mobile-powered smartphones, requiring at least WM 5.0.

Deepfish is purportedly built on the groundwork laid by Seadragon Software (which MS recently acquired), and makes some pretty interesting promises:

Deepfish provides users with a full "as-designed" view of virtually any Web site on their mobile device and looks as you would expect it to on your desktop, allowing much more of the Web to be easily viewed on a mobile device than is possible today. The interface lets users zoom in and out on the parts of a Web page that interest them in an intuitive way, making it easy to use these large-screen formatted pages on a mobile device. On current mobile browsers, it can typically take up to a minute or more for a Web page to render, however the Deepfish architecture only loads the user-specified portion of the page, providing much quicker page-load times, as detailed information is only retrieved as needed or in the background.”

Full Article here.

[orcinus]

As usual, Microsoft at its best - blatantly ripping off solutions and concepts already present on the market... a few years too late.

(Opera 8 and Nokia Web Browser anyone?)

[Sparrow]

There's a fascinating demo of SeaDragon (with PhotoSynth) at
http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/view/id/129

I'd love to have a virtual library where books could be accessed like 'Bleak House' in the demo (it's the way I imagined libraries of the future would be).

[cerement]

And Mozilla fights back with Fennec (aka Firefox 3 Mobile or "Firefox Jr.")
Review at ArsTechnica

[zelda_pinwheel]

Originally Posted by Sparrow

There's a fascinating demo of SeaDragon (with PhotoSynth) at
http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/view/id/129

I'd love to have a virtual library where books could be accessed like 'Bleak House' in the demo (it's the way I imagined libraries of the future would be).

my god i love technology. that demo made me think "it's finally the future !"