Considering how many times I’ve written about it, it probably goes without saying that I’m a fan of Skyfire. By way of server-side magic (read: proxied data compression), it’s still the only smartphone browser that can reliably play both Flash and Silverlight content. Its only fault? It’s only available for Windows Mobile and Symbian S60.
The company has plans to expand to other platforms, and they’ve just made an acquisition to help get that done. Today, Skyfire is announcing that they’ve acquired kolbysoft, makers of the popular Steel browser for Android, for an undisclosed amount.
When we asked, Skyfire disclosed that the primary reason for this purchase was “talent” – more specifically, kolbysoft’s skill “at building on top of WebKit”. WebKit is the open-source browser rendering engine used in a huge number of popular smartphone browsers, including Safari and the default browsers on both webOS and Android. Skyfire has thus far relied on a different (and reputedly slower/more complicated) rendering engine called Gecko; with this acquisition, it’s safe to assume that the Android port of Skyfire will be WebKit-based.
As far as I can tell, kolbysoft is a one-man operation, with most of Steel’s development happening at the hands of Michael Kolb. Steel is the self-proclaimed “browser to show to your friends with the other phone”, and, according to Cyrket, one of the Top 100 most popular applications on the Android market.
So when can we expect Skyfire to hit Android? Sooner than we could before, presumably – but that’s all we know, for now. While Skyfire would say that its development was well underway, they weren’t willing to disclose just how far along the project was, nor give a tentative release date.
Meh, Skyfire is nothing special. I kinda have a feeling they are waiting to be bought by someone with a gimmick they provide.
I think with pinch-zoom functionality on the default browser I see no reason to have any other browser on my Nexus.
On the other hand, I cannot wait for Flash on Android but it looks like I will have to wait for a while…
Yeah, I don’t get what the big deal is. Skyfire is slow and laggy. Videos play like slideshows.
Why bother?
And what’s their business model? How are they going to make money?
Skyfire team is untalented copy cats with deep pockets.
After 3 years you are planning change your strategy & rendering engine, it is not going to work, they will shut down in a year!
So you mean they hired him?
Yeah and he is a bitch.
Just tried the Steel browser.
It’s utterly pathetic. The UI is crappy and bass-ackwards. It’s slow. Usability sucks.
Good luck, Skyfire, you are going down.
Steel is my favourite Android browser. It´s one finger zoom is much more precise than pinch to zoom on my Motorola Milestone.