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Microsoft entering the mobile browsing market too

Published March 29th, 2007 1:31 AM EDT By Daniel Goldman

deepfish.pngEarlier today Microsoft released a public beta of Deepfish, a mobile browser, which, like Opera Mobile and Opera Mini, can display virtually all websites (not just mobile WAP sites).

Microsoft is calling this a “new browsing experience”. I haven’t yet had much time to poke around Deepfish (it’s late at night here), but the big feature that it has over the current version of Opera Mobile and Opera Mini seems to be the Wii-like zoom that enables you to zoom in and out of a particular page section. Early last month Opera announced that the upcoming edition of the Opera 9 browser for Opera Mobile will include Intelligent Zoom capabilities, similar to the Wii Opera browser.

I’m curious to know more about how Deepfish relates to Internet Explorer (IE) and Pocket IE, as well as the rendering engine it uses?

The mobile browser is part of Live Labs and is still considered a research product.

(via Saito)

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11 Comments

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  1. 1 GT500 Mar 29th, 2007 at 3:34 am
    using Opera Opera 9.20 on Linux Linux

    Microsoft must have decided that the mobile platform was too secure.

    I wonder if this is going to be a Windows Mobile only kind of thing, or if it will work on various other mobile platforms…

  2. 2 DrLaunch Mar 29th, 2007 at 6:30 am
    using Opera Opera 9.20 on Windows Windows XP

    I bet it will only work on Windows Mobile. And there’s something about it that smells fishy (pun intended).

  3. 3 Muzammil Mar 29th, 2007 at 6:33 am
    using Opera Opera 9.20 on Windows Windows XP

    the blue fish looks pretty cool.

  4. 4 David Naylor Mar 29th, 2007 at 8:01 am
    using Mozilla Firefox Mozilla Firefox 2.0.0.3 on Windows Windows XP

    According to Neowin’s article it may become cross-platform.

  5. 5 Daniel Goldman Mar 29th, 2007 at 9:58 am
    using Opera Opera 9.20 on Windows Windows XP

    GT500, from their webpage description, it sounds like it will only work on Windows Mobile.

  6. 6 legalalien Mar 29th, 2007 at 10:59 am
    using Mozilla Firefox Mozilla Firefox 2.0.0.3 on Windows Windows XP

    Looks like it’s not a true browser, but a viewer like Picsel Browser or Bitstream’s Thunderhawk

  7. 7 Romain Mar 29th, 2007 at 1:14 pm
    using Opera Opera 9.10 on Windows Windows XP

    From Microsoft « What is Deepfish » page:

    A familiar look and feel of web pages on mobile as seen on desktop.

    It may be good to have pages that look the same on mobile and desktop, but I think that it’s boring to always scroll from left to right and right to left in order to read a text that is wider than the viewport…

    Nevertheless, I really like the UI.

  8. 8 kL Mar 29th, 2007 at 2:57 pm
    using Opera Opera 9.20 on Mac OS Mac OS X

    It doesn’t eliminate horizontal scrolling. Demo explains that it just sends screenshot of the page using lossy image compression.

  9. 9 IceArdor Mar 30th, 2007 at 1:22 am
    using Internet Explorer Internet Explorer 7.0 on Windows Windows XP

    I wonder if this thing takes 25MB like IE7 does. Not exactly light weight or “mobile”.

  10. 10 GT500 Apr 2nd, 2007 at 1:34 pm
    using Internet Explorer Internet Explorer 10.0 on Windows Windows XP

    Originally posted by IceArdor:

    I wonder if this thing takes 25MB like IE7 does. Not exactly light weight or “mobile”.

    From what I’ve heard, it won’t have the full rendering engine in it. In theory, it will take up only a tiny fraction of the space that IE7 does.

  11. 11 Adam Messinger Apr 2nd, 2007 at 3:34 pm
    using Mozilla Firefox Mozilla Firefox 2.0.0.3 on Windows Windows XP

    I wonder if this thing takes 25MB like IE7 does. Not exactly light weight or “mobile”.

    The actual rendering engine for IE is only a fraction of that program’s disk footprint. Assuming IE7 works the same as previous versions in this regard, the rendering engine is contained in the mshtml.dll file. The rest of the code is user-level features, system services, and (of course) OS tie-ins and patches.

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