Third party mobile browser Skyfire releases version 1.1

It's been about three months since Skyfire officially launched on Windows Mobile and Symbian S60 3rd Edition, and this week the popular mobile browser has been given a general performance upgrade.

Skyfire's Senior Director of Product Management Robert Oberhofer said in his team blog that Version 1.1 has an upgraded algorithm to shorten load times, improved reconnect (the browser disconnects from pages to save battery), support for WML markup language, and upgrades to its support for Flash, Quicktime, and Silverlight. This final upgrade is central to Skyfire, as it is one of the best mobile browsers for watching streaming video.

Though the user interface remains mostly unchanged, the user experience has been enhanced. Symbian's scrolling and zooming has been sped up and smoothed out, and paging up and down has been added to keypad shortcuts. The "2" and "8" keys now act as Page-Up and Page-Down, and the asterisk key now summons the "Superbar," Skyfire's hybrid search/address bar.

Several bugs have been fixed in this release as well, including a bug which caused Skyfire to quit on startup on Windows Mobile 6.5 devices, and one which made it impossible to uninstall Skyfire on the Samsung Propel and Jack if the SIM card wasn't detected.

Skyfire remains free, and can be downloaded on Windows Mobile (smartphone/PPC) devices, and Symbian S60 3rd Edition devices in the US, Canada, and UK.