Microsoft unveils Deepfish, a new approach to mobile web browsing
Microsoft appears to be working hard in innovating for mobile technologies lately. Following this week’s announcement of ZenZui, a spinoff company having originated in Microsoft’s Redmond Research Lab, Microsoft showed off a new web browsing technology at this week’s O’Reilly Emerging Technology Conference. The technology is called Deepfish, and it attempts to make web browsing on a mobile device more closely resemble the web browsing experience on a computer.
In order to do this, Deepfish takes a different approach to browsing on a mobile phone. Instead of loading specially-developed pages that were designed with a mobile phone in mind—often involving extremely simplistic layouts, minimal visual elements, and lots of vertical text scrolling in order to minimize screen space and bandwidth use—Deepfish displays the full layout of the page on the mobile screen, as a sort of thumbnail. The user can then zoom in and out of parts of the page “in an intuitive way” in order to read the content from that part of the page.
Most full web pages typically require lots of time to load on a mobile phone due to their having been designed for a computer. Deepfish attempts to get around this problem and minimize bandwidth usage. When it loads the overall thumbnail of the page, Deepfish is not loading the entire page, but rather a smaller, more bandwidth-friendly snapshot of it. And when the user zooms in on certain parts of the page to read, Deepfish only renders that part of the page instead of the entire thing.