Skyfire mobile browser goes global

The Skyfire mobile browser has been inching into wide availability for months now, but with its latest release this week, it is now accessible to any user worldwide – albeit only on Windows Mobile and Symbian devices.

The focus on those devices makes sense, though, because the browser aims to bring iPhone-style browsing to devices that have lacked strong browsers in the past. Along with the Opera Mini browser – which works on almost all phones, including feature phones – mobile users now have the capabilities to view the full Web on a mobile device.

Previously, Skyfire was only available by punching in a mobile number and was limited to North America +1 country codes only. Now Skyfire has added support for the UK (+44) for over-the-air installs and is also letting users download the application to their desktop and install it via synch from there, essentially opening it to all comers. Along with that change, Skyfire is no longer requiring registration to install and download the browser.

Skyfire runs as a client-server proxy browser, which means the company does some processing on the server side in order to make complex Web pages – including pages that have embedded Flash or Silverlight content – run on a mobile device. That means users can see sophisticated Web pages – such as ESPN.com, with multiple Flash and Flash video components; or YouTube, which delivers its video in an embedded Flash Video player – run on a mobile device as they do on the Web.

While more devices – including the iPhone, T-Mobile Android G1 and the newer Blackberry releases – are getting stronger native browsers, many mobile devices still lack built-in browsers that can run the Web at any level of desktop fidelity. Skyfire loads a Web page on a mobile device much as it looks on the desktop and then allows users to pan, scan and zoom to see the portions of the page they want – including embedded multimedia elements.

Windows Mobile and Symbian users can download Skyfire directly by pointing their mobile browsers to http://get.skyfire.com.