The iPhone cracked it open how?

[With the Safari browser,] any Web site that's out there, minus Flash content, is useable on the mobile device. With iPhone, you go to CNN.com and get what you expect to see. The marketing push that Apple put behind this, in changing the average user's expectations, has been one of their major contributions.

And they made some major updates to the browser [user interface] -- the nice big screen and the touch interface -- which make it a pleasant experience to interact with the Web. Other browsers could render the page but it was hard to get useful information out of the page.

So what does Skyfire hope to introduce?

Two things. First, we're looking at the overall evolution of the interaction with the Web on mobile, the [new] expectation that any desktop Web site will be available on any mobile device. (See a video of Skyfire's debut at DEMO 08.)

Second, how to get optimized mobile content: pulling in information from the device to be used by the Web-based services. So how do we give the right hooks to developers to figure out things like the phone's screen width, so it can deliver the right content?

So the heart of this is the new mobile browser?

We're developing a browser, first, that's based on an existing open source browser's core: desktop Firefox. Anything available on that, we can build into our mobile browser.

Second, we're a proxy browser: there is a minimal set of functions on the phone, and the browser instance itself runs on a server. We offload the compute-intensive tasks to the server.

Are their tradeoffs with that kind of "thin client" browser approach?

A couple of things are problematic. It's not good for intranet or private browsing, of resources tied to a corporate network for example. To a degree, we also don't have access to local resources such as files on the phone since the browser is on the server. That's not a major shortcoming at this point.

What are the benefits of a server-based browser?

We're able to save a lot of compute power on the device. It has very small memory footprint, and low battery use. And there are significant savings in network traffic. In the US, this shows in faster responsiveness: we average 5-6 seconds to display a page vs. 20 seconds or more by Safari for the same page. We process on the server, and then start to download and display images on the phone as they're ready.