Microsoft Deepfish mobile surfing is too fishy for now

Alex Zaharov-Reutt
Friday, 30 March 2007 22:31

Opinion and Analysis

Dr Flake continues that “Deepfish provides users with a full "as-designed" view of virtually any Web site on their mobile device and looks as you would expect it to on your desktop, allowing much more of the Web to be easily viewed on a mobile device than is possible today. The interface lets users zoom in and out on the parts of a Web page that interest them in an intuitive way, making it easy to use these large-screen formatted pages on a mobile device. On current mobile browsers, it can typically take up to a minute or more for a Web page to render, however the Deepfish architecture only loads the user-specified portion of the page, providing much quicker page-load times, as detailed information is only retrieved as needed or in the background”.

In a question on how different Deepfish is to existing mobile browsing solutions, Flake basically says that because existing browsers try to reformat desktop content onto a small screen, web pages and sites get ‘crushed’, resulting in excessive scrolling and difficult-to-view pages that simply aren’t “what the Web designer intended”.

Unfortunately, Deepfish is still in deep prototype mode, so there are no “specific plans for making the product more widely available”, and that “Microsoft constantly experiments in advanced user interfaces and Live Labs is about showing what’s possible today through demonstrable examples such as Deepfish”.

So, for mobile users, without the ability to download Deepfish, which is still a limited beta in any case without access to cookies or Javascript, the only real solution is to either stumble along with the underpowered browser already on your phone, or to give Opera a go. Opera Mini is free for cell phones, while Opera Mobile, for Windows Powered devices (smartphones and Pocket PCs) and Symbian 60 devices, offering the full web browsing experience including tabbed browsing, costs US $24 and is available today from the Opera website.

On that note, we called Opera in Norway, and asked them what they thought of the Deepfish browser. Thomas Ford, Opera's PR Manager of Consumer Brands said that "There's nothing new and exciting about Deepfish. Because it's only geared towards Windows Mobile, it lacks the cross-platform flexibility and capability of Opera's products.  We don't see it currently as a major threat to our Mobile browsers. What we wonder is, why, if they're so terribly focused on getting Pocket IE ready for Windows Mobile 6.0, are they working on a new browser again?".

Of course you'd expect Opera to say something like that, but why not? It's true, after all, and their browser exists in final form, happily servicing Symbian 60, Pocket PC and Windows Smartphone users around the world, today. I’ll certainly give Deepfish a go when Microsoft makes it available once more for download, but for true mobile browsing with all the features available today, a night, day and your wireless life through the Opera Mobile browser is the only true, useable and inexpensive alternative.

Sure, it’s not free – but it works in the way you expect it to, today. Go fishing for the unavailable Deepfish browser if you want, but Opera has already caught me, and it’ll probably catch you, too!