A year and a half after introducing an innovative web browser for Windows Mobile, Microsoft is killing the project. Back before there was an Opera Mini 4 or an iPhone version of Safari, the Deepfish web browser offered a way to display full desktop views of web pages on a tiny browser, allowing you to zoom in on the area you want to read.

The browser was developed by the Microsfot Live Labs team and was never released to the general public. But I wouldn't be surprised if some Deepfish code has found its way into the upcoming Internet Explorer Mobile 6.

In a blog post, the developers behind Deepfish say the goal was never to build a complete browser, but rather to show that an innovative user interface could make for better mobile browsing. The team also implies that Deepfish helped inspire the development of full desktop views in other browsers like Safari, Opera Mini, and Opera Mobile.

You can check out a video shot early last year of Deepfish in action after the jump.

[via jkOnTheRun and My Today Screen]

A little over a month after releasing a public beta of Opera Mini 4.1, the Opera team has pushed out the final version of its latest cellphone browser. The newest build is reportedly 50% faster than opera mini 4.0. It also has a handful of new features including the ability to save web paes fr offline viewing, the ability to upload and download images from within the browser, and improved page and web search features.

The final build looks a lot like the public beta, but the developers have fixed a bunch of bugs and made some changes to the page saving and address auto-complete features.

Opera Mini 4.1 is available as a free download for dozens of different cellphone models.

Microsoft isn't the only company releasing a point upgrade to its mobile software this week. Opera has released Opera Mini 4.1 beta, which is a minor update to its Opera Mini web browser for cellphones with Java virtual machines. For a minor update, Opera did manage to pack a few useful features into Opera Mini 4.1:

• Opera claims the new version is 50% faster than Opera Mini 4.0
• There's a new URL autocomplete feature based on your browsing history
• You can now search for text in a web page
• Web pages can be saved for offline viewing
• You can upload and download files from within the browser
• Google search has been integrated with the URL bar, allowing you to conduct a web search from any page.

Opera Mini 4.1 is available as a free download. If you've got an older version of Opera Mini on your device, note that Opera Mini 4.1 will install alongside it, not over it. So you will have to uninstall the older version manually.

[via jkOnTheRun]

Opera plans to show off its next generation mobile web browser at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona next week. While Opera Mobile 9.5 won't be available commercially until this spring, the company has released a video previewing some of the browser's more exciting features.

Opera also has a tendency to release public betas of its mobile software several months in advance of a commercial release. So there's a good chance you'll be able to use Opera Mobile 9.5 beta for free for a while before buying it.

In a nutshell, Opera Mobile 9.5 appears to have many of the features that have made Opera Mini popular. But unlike the Java-based Opera Mini, Opera Mobile is designed to run on Windows Mobile and Symbian phones. Opera Mobile 9.5 allows users to view full screen versions of web pages, or to zoom in for more detail. You also get tabbed browsing, fast page rendering, and convenient bookmark, transfer, and history managers.

The browser will also include a mobile version of Opera's widget engine which allows you to access some web content like Flickr images without opening a web browser. It also packs Flash Lite 3 integration for accessing Flash-heavy web pages like MySpace or YouTube.

[via the::unwired]

While mobile web browsers have come a long way in recent years, so has the web. Today's mobile browsers like Opera Mini and Safari for the iPhone let you zoom in and out of web pages and let you scale text and images to fit on a small screen. You can even watch some web video. But mobile browsers still have a tough time handling pages that make heavy use of Ajax, Flash 9, JavaScript, and other modern technologies.

Skyfire is a new browser for Windows Mobile smartphones launching in private beta at this week's DEMO 2008 conference. The Skyfire team claims that the mobile browser is the first to support Flash 9, and as you can see in the video above, the browser seems to handle YouTube and other multimedia content much the same way a desktop browser would. You don't have to download and convert files to view them or open them in a separate video player.

According to Webware, the way Skyfire achieves this is by acting as a proxy browser. In other words, the Windows Mobile application isn't really a full web browser. Instead, Skyfire hosts an application on its servers that does all of the hard work of rendering the web content and then delivers it to the client software on your phone. On the one hand, this makes it easy to deliver full web content to the underpowered device in the palm of your hand. On the other hand, we're a bit concerned about what would happen if Skyfire actually becomes popular and the company's servers start to get hammered by users making web requests from their mobile phones.

Skyfire currently supports Windows Mobile 5.0/6 phones with full QWERTY keyboards. A Symbian client is coming soon.

It's been a while since we've heard anything from Access about their NetFront web browser for Windows Mobile. Up until Opera Mobile and Opera Mini were released, NetFront was a serious contender for the crown of best Windows Mobile web browser.

Of course, pretty much any Windows Mobile web browser is better than Pocket Internet Explorer. But NetFront has long supported tabbed browsing, quicker page loads, and a few other features missing from Pocket Internet Explorer.

The new beta includes a few optimization tweaks, a PagePilot feature that lets you see the entire page or just parts of a page, and visual bookmarks, which are thumbnails of bookmarked pages.

NetFront Browser 3.4 technical preview is available as a free download which will expire on February 29th. There's no support for ActiveX, Flash, JV-Lite2, or several other features which will be present in the final version. The browser requires Windows Mobile 5.0 or newer to run.

[via the::unwired]

Want that iPhone-like mobile web browser without the iPhone price? Opera has released the final version of Opera Mini 4, which can probably run on the phone you already have.

The stable version of Opera Mini 4 has pretty much all the same features as the beta version we told you about a few weeks ago, plus a few bug fixes here and there. But it's a huge step up over previous versions of Opera Mini, and most mobile phone browsers. Here are just a few of the things it can do:

• Synchronize bookmarks and Speed Dial preferences with your desktop Opera browser using Opera Link.
• View full web pages and then zoom in to areas you want to see close up.
• Dynamically changes text size to fit your screen.
• Images fit to screen

There's also support for RSS feeds and keyboard shortcuts. Opera Mini 4 uses the same rendering engine as Opera's desktop browser, which means you should be able to visit pretty much any site on the web from your mobile phone. Oh yeah, we almost forgot. Opera Mini 4 is a free download.
[via The Opera Mini Blog]

Opera's desktop web browser isn't the only browser getting an update today. Opera Mini 4 beta 3 is also out, and there are a ton of new features since beta 2.

• Support for Opera Link (synchronize your bookmarks and speed dial settings across multiple instances of Opera)
• Added Speed Dials
• Added RSS feed support
• Added shortcuts
• Images fit to screen better
• Page position and scaling preserved after page reloads
• Changed some options and descriptions

Opera is a pretty good desktop browser with a few innovative features you won't find in any other browser (without add-ons). But some pages still don't render properly, particularly Google services.

Opera Mini is hands down one of the best, if not the best browser for mobile phones. It renders pages quickly, and has the iPhone-like ability to view a full page or zoom in on particular areas. So while it's nice to see Opera continuing to build new features into the desktop browser, we're most excited when Opera focuses on what it does well: mobile browsing.
[via Opera Mini Blog]