5 Things I hate about Skyfire S60

I wrote 5 Things I like about Skyfire S60 (v1.1.0.13041). And after using it more extensively for my daily internet consumption, I want to share the 5 things I hate about it.

1. No keyboard/keypad shortcut for page up, page down, page left & page right. On Opera Mini and Opera Mobile, the shorcut is defaulted to 2 (up), 8 (down), 4 (left) and 6 (right). And Skyfire doesnt allow any customisation in this department.

2. Bad text/font rendering.
Texts are sometimes not properly rendered, not fitted into the reading area. More right-left scrolling is needed. Skyfire needs to implement a more intelligent text reflowing technology to fit texts on the screen reading area. The current one does work okay if the connection is fast but if the connection is slow, the texts are sometimes unreadable. Maybe the font needs to be antialiased? I havent even touch on the font size yet i.e. the font is soo small in the address bar.

3. Checkerboard
Ok. Rendering web-pages nowadays is not easy. Many web technologies and standards need to be taken into account. Occassionally, Skyfire is able to render pages beatifully. Almost desktop-like quality. But when it comes to usability, especially after loading the page for the first time, Skyfire did not load in full. As you scroll down to read the contents, the page is re-rendered. And most of the time, the checkerboard appears. Frustrating… Especially when it needs to load many page elements.

4. Unreliable connection manager. In order to simplify things and making it not complicated, Skyfire’s connection manager is too simple. There are 2 options. ”Change Connection” and ”Remember Last”. There is no way to set a default connection in Skyfire. Sometimes, the connection manager goes into endless loops and failed to connect to any access point. Which will trigger a prompt asking user to close Skifire or try again. Please add a setting to set a default access point.

5. No kinetic scrolling. Using Skyfire to read long pages is painful. It requires scrolling down, left, right. Implementing kinetic scrolling, in my opinion, will make it more useful.

Those are my top 5 things that I hate in the current version of Skyfire S60. I start to like Skyfire and using it more often especially when on high-speed network and I need to access specific pages that need to be loaded in desktop view.

When Skyfire works, using high-speed internet connection (WiFi or 3G), it works brilliantly and is not as bad as I expected. But 80% of the time, it doesnt…

I hope the team behind Skyfire will work harder to iron these issues and add features. It has many potentials and I can see average Joes who does not belong to Geeksland using Skyfire to access their favourite net contents in the future.

- Asri al-Baker