Comments on: DeepFish – a blessing and concern for mobile web

By: Honko

Honko — Fri, 13 Apr 2007 05:17:18 +0000

Doesn’t sound particularly scalable. I wonder why they didn’t just make Pocket IE work this way in the first place, and do the render/resize on the client.

By: Zim

Zim — Fri, 30 Mar 2007 21:10:49 +0000

Who said *something* is taking a picture of every web you visit? Maybe they use hamsters or Pigeons, like Google

By: tom

tom — Fri, 30 Mar 2007 05:04:19 +0000

the fact that more and more mobile makers seems to go this route raises the question if the big promise of xhtml is all but failed.

Wasn’t the idea of xhtml to separate content from presentation. then format content depending on output device.

I have a JasJam but must say the web browser on that thing (ie mobile) truly sucks. Most pages don’t display properly and very very few web sites seem to provide a mobile specific version.

So what happened to xhtml and targeting different devices?

By: Sam

Sam — Fri, 30 Mar 2007 02:52:37 +0000

I’m pretty sure the feds can already issue orders to phone companies to track what you download on your mobile as well as who you call. Being able to see what you see is a step up and can fob off arguments of the content changing, but there are probably other ways of proving it, such as search engine caches or archive.org.

By: tino

tino — Thu, 29 Mar 2007 22:42:51 +0000

Hmm, I think this is the wrong way to go. The biggest advantage of webpages over other media is, that the content and the design are separated from each other. So why trying to render webpages as on a 24″ screen? What we need is intelligent software to displays the content in a well but special designed way on mobile devices.

By: Demens

Demens — Thu, 29 Mar 2007 17:45:29 +0000

Shame that there is already a browser that can do these things, has been a long time.
I first saw it about 1.5/2 years ago on a palm device, it’s called “Picsel browser”. It currently ships with some samsung ppc-phone.
- Full page rendering, uses similar rendering method as deepfish. But does the rendering and loading on the device.
- Lightning fast, both rendering and browsing.
- Can be controlled with just one finger. Like if you tap the page, then tap and hold, it zooms.

By: Nigel

Nigel — Thu, 29 Mar 2007 16:56:16 +0000

Nokia have a browser for S60 based on Safari, and now open-sourced which provides similar capabilities.

You can read more at http://opensource.nokia.com/projects/S60browser/

I have a Nokia N80 running Symbian 9.1. This also has a 352×416 screen and the browser is about the best I’ve seen. You can easily browse most regular sites, and pan/scan/zoom accordingly. I mean.. like a PC

Yet I do sometimes use opera mini as very complex pages cause the device to run out of memory rendering (the N80’s achilles heal – simply not enough ram)

I’m also with 3UK which provides a 3G services (although N80 doesn’t do HSDPA) and for 5 UKP get up to 1Gb data pcm.

In fact these devices are great – I have MSN messenger, skype, VoIP support (over 802.11b/g), email (google mail is good), podcast support. But the coolest is flickr integration. I’ve done this via shozu. Actually it is so easy I accidentally submitted a (innocent) picture to BBC News when experimenting with the camera!

By: Comrade Ghorkov

Comrade Ghorkov — Thu, 29 Mar 2007 16:05:57 +0000

Surely by sending pure images over the air to handsets takes up more bandwidth than just the HTML? I reckon this product will be the saviour of cellphone network companies, they’ll make a killing by charging by the kilobyte on every page you load.

In the UK, the PAYG operators charge £4 per megabyte, as you can imagine, a 2KB webpage can be stretched into a massive 20KB preview image. It’s going to add up quickly.

Why can’t the scaling-down of the page be done on the mobile device itself? Opera’s SSR technology is useful, why can’t Microsoft admit defeat for once rather than vying for a decidedly inferior alternative?