Skyfire created some buzz recently with its Silverlight support. Now the new browser is finally available to the public, but will it grow into a real success?
You may already have seen Skyfire being tested against the usual bunch of mobile browsers, and the results have been mixed. While Skyfire is capable of churning whatever you want, it's relying heavily on a Firefox engine on dedicated Skyfire servers. The Web content is then mirrored to your Windows Mobile or Symbian smartphone via the Skyfire browser.
The key challenge of such a solution is obviously server demand and costs. The team behind Skyfire is supposed to be experts in server architecture, so we assume they'll be able to keep up to speed with the user growth, at least for a while. Like many start-ups, however, it's not clear how Skyfire will finance the costs involved in the long run.
The most obvious, and perhaps only way, is to let advertising pay the bills. With a market increasingly consisting of high-res smartphones, Skyfire would be able to embed an advertisement in its interface without taking up too much space. On the other hand, by the time that would have become a serious possibility, the big players have already licensed their latest and greatest browsers to most manufacturers and carriers.
When looking at the history of the hundreds of mobile browsers that have existed, we think Skyfire will be yet another one that only reaches version 1.0 or 2.0. Anyway, now Skyfire 0.8 is available to the public here; have fun while it lasts.
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