Hi all! Let me say thank you for discovering this interesting project. I am searching for the best web browser for my new Acer S200 phone with WM 6.5 and 480x800 screen resolution. I don't even want to talk about the built-in IE, because its quality is actually in beta stage. But both Opera Mobile 10 and SkyFire are very interesting. The problem I have in Opera is pixelated graphics without smoothing on my hi-res screen, the SkyFire problem is opposite - while the graphics is displayed smoothly, the fonts are looking blurry. Overall the SkyFire is a nice browser, I like its Zoom feature and Flash support. The developers should also improve the multi-language support, for example while searching a clip on Youtube I tried to enter the search phrase in russian language and SkyFire turns the phrase into garbage after entering.

Please provide a way in a new builds to turn off the font smoothing, it's really important for hi-res screens like my 480x800, otherwise the fonts are too blurry.

Same problem here on my 480x640 VGA device, Dizzy. Even after I've zoomed in until the text reaches a normal size, about the size I use offline in an editor, I have to zoom in much further to make the text readable. This has me constantly sliding the screen from side to side, because now the text is too big, and Skyfire doesn't reflow the text to fit the screen. Text is reflowed on mobile sites, but there the zoom is disabled, so I'm no better off.

I'm wondering whether you are using OM 10 with turbo enabled. If you are, you should see a big difference in image rendering once you disable turbo. The images won't be pixelated without turbo's data compression, but pages will load more slowly.

Skyfire's strength is in its ability to display inline videos and desktop page layouts. It's not nearly as useful in other internet activities. Opera can handle some of the other stuff, such as uploading to web sites, accessing locally stored HTML files, bookmark management, etc., but still has some issues with text handling and page rendering, even after the recent release of Mobile 10.

My take on the whole issue is that browser developers these days seem bent on providing a full internet experience, which is futile on such small screens. It seems contrary to the original purpose of a mobile browser, that of making internet content easily accessible on a mobile device.

The latest products are not really mobile browsers; they should be properly called "desktop emulators". That's where Skyfire is ahead of the competition.

No I'm not using Turbo mode.. In a Turbo mode the things are much worse. You can see the pixelation in a normal mode in O10 only if you have a screen close to your eyes, but it's definitely there, especially in comparison with iPhone. The problem is caused by zooming the digital images to hi resolution of the phone (the pixel size is tiny there) and by the fact that Opera does not use any graphics smoothing algorithm like SkyFire. But actually the fonts are looking great in Opera and unfortunately poor in SkyFire. I believe the SkyFire is using an anti-aliasing graphical filter to the whole page before displaying it, so the problem is here.

Also I have noticed, that despite the Skyfire's advertising of being "blazingly fast", the Firefox Mobile Alpha 4 has much faster rendering (unfortunately the development is stopped there). That is strange because SkyFire is based on a Firefox Gecko engine. That's probably because FF mobile is optimized for hi-performance WM6 phones.

I can't draw any comparisons between Skyfire and Firefox Mobile alpha (Fennec) here, because I'm running WM5. Fennec installed successfully on my device, but would not even start.

Skyfire's speed is not bad, but no, it's not blazingly fast. The fastest browser I've used so far is Opera Mini 5 in the new native WM version, which, unfortunately, is still in beta, and quite unstable.

Edit:

I wouldn't know, as I'm very presbyopic, and can't focus that close.

The developers are looking at improvements to this for a future release.