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Jessica Dolcourt from CNET has a fascinating article about Skyfire’s new Symbian S60 beta and what this means to the current browser war that’s in the brewing for us S60 users.

While I tend to agree to her analysis, I personally don’t think Skyfire would appeal to enough users to be able to stand up to Opera’s new Mobile Browser v9.5. I point to a number of reasons why I think Opera Mobile would win despite Skyfire:
Exclusivity = excludability – Many users won’t get the chance to try the browser out for themselves, and thus Skyfire won’t be able to win over a lot of current Opera users who wish to try the browser out for themselves. Furthermore, the trial is only limited to US users; to put it bluntly, the number of S60 users in the US numbers much fewer than in Europe and Asia, so not a lot of Symbian users get to know about the browser in the first place.

Number of beta testers accepted – not a lot of users are accepted in the beta programme, as opposed to Opera Mini’s beat programme where all users could just download and share their experiences and bugs. And “many hands make work light”, so shouldn’t Skyfire open up it’s programme to a larger number of users?

Opera Mini – with it’s worldwide success and huge number of users, this app has elevated Opera’s status to a very high level. With a choice between Opera Mobile and a new browser in the market, I think most users would opt for Opera simply because of their past experiences with Opera Mini.Despite all this, it’s a win-win situation for all S60 users. There’s been rumours from Opera’s camp about Flash integration, and Skyfire supports both AJAX and Flash in it’s browser (or it will by the time the final version is released).

What do you think of the two browsers?

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Jessica Dolcourt from CNET has a fascinating article about Skyfire’s new Symbian S60 beta and what this means to the current browser war that’s in the brewing for us S60 users.

While I tend to agree to her analysis, I personally don’t think Skyfire would appeal to enough users to be able to stand up to Opera’s new Mobile Browser v9.5. I point to a number of reasons why I think Opera Mobile would win despite Skyfire:
Exclusivity = excludability – Many users won’t get the chance to try the browser out for themselves, and thus Skyfire won’t be able to win over a lot of current Opera users who wish to try the browser out for themselves. Furthermore, the trial is only limited to US users; to put it bluntly, the number of S60 users in the US numbers much fewer than in Europe and Asia, so not a lot of Symbian users get to know about the browser in the first place.

Number of beta testers accepted – not a lot of users are accepted in the beta programme, as opposed to Opera Mini’s beat programme where all users could just download and share their experiences and bugs. And “many hands make work light”, so shouldn’t Skyfire open up it’s programme to a larger number of users?

Opera Mini – with it’s worldwide success and huge number of users, this app has elevated Opera’s status to a very high level. With a choice between Opera Mobile and a new browser in the market, I think most users would opt for Opera simply because of their past experiences with Opera Mini.Despite all this, it’s a win-win situation for all S60 users. There’s been rumours from Opera’s camp about Flash integration, and Skyfire supports both AJAX and Flash in it’s browser (or it will by the time the final version is released).

What do you think of the two browsers?

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