The Skyfire web browser has been getting a lot of attention lately. It’s one of the first browsers that brings Adobe Flash support (kind of) to the iPhone, iPod touch, and iPad. The company also offers Android app with support for Flash videos, an attractive browser tab UI for switching pages, and integrated tools for sharing web content with your contacts.
But Skyfire got its start making browsers for Windows Mobile and Symbian devices. Skyfire 1.0 was designed to load web pages quickly on devices with slow processors and slow internet connections by using remote servers to pre-render web content before sending it along to your phone.
Skyfire 2.0, on the other hand, uses your phone’s hardware to render web pages using a Webkit engine with support for HTML5 and Javascript. The remote servers are still used to convert Flash video into HTML5 for viewing on mobile devices, but all in all, Skyfire 2.0 is a very different type of browser.
The company has decided to end support for Skyfire 1.0 and focus instead on new technologies. Because of the way Skfyire 1.0 worked as a “proxy browser,” the end of support basically means the browser will stop working when Skyfire stops supporting it on December 31st.
Unfortunately Skyfire 2.0 doesn’t currently run on Windows Mobile and Symbian. That means that until the company ports Skyfire 2.0 to additional platforms, the browser will only be available for iOS and Android.
In a blog post, the company suggests that Skyfire could come soon to Windows Phone 7, MeeGo, or Blackberry 6. But there’s no official announcement yet, and it looks like users with older phones are going to be out of luck.