Smartphone Thoughts: Deepfish Now Sleeping With The Fishes

"When Live Labs began working on Deepfish, we didn't set out to create a new mobile browser. What we set out to do was to prove our theory that there was an unmet demand for a better mobile browsing experience than what was available at the time we started the project in 2006, and that a novel and simple new user experience was the best way to achieve that. The positive reception and incredible demand for the Deepfish technical preview went a long way towards proving that. And now, thanks in part to Deepfish, many better alternatives are emerging."

Microsoft Research projects are always a bit hard to figure out - Microsoft puts a huge amount of money into R&D, but I'm often left scratching my head when it comes to what they actually get out of it. This article has some insights, but Deepfish seems like a project that didn't seem to go anywhere. We originally posted about Deepfish back in March of 2007, and certainly by then there was many browser initiatives underway - not the least of which was the iPhone which would launch to much fanfare some three months later. So what did Deepfish give us? I'm not sure - it was a proxy-based solution, which in the long-haul doesn't really scale well to a large user-base. If you're RIM and you're selling a server solution it does, but fundamentally any server-based service needs a revenue model and I didn't see Deepfish providing a solution in that regard. Were any of you still actively using Deepfish? Will you be sad to see it go, or have you already moved on to other browser solutions?