Deepfish, in Deepsh**?
I posted a little bit ago about Microsoft’s new experimental browser, Deepfish. Well Gizmodo got their hands on it and put it through the paces, check out the link for a video and their thoughts. Pretty much everything you thought was going to be a problem was - all stemming from the strange notion of turning web pages into images and browsing by scrolling and zooming into those images. I don’t know about the rest of the Windows Mobile web experience, but if this is their fix for it, I feel bad for WM users.
If this was 1995 and all the web was a bunch of flat, unidirectional pages with no interactivity then sure, this would be an interesting solution. But apparently forms don’t even work in the browser. Forms. Turns out some sites have forms on them, now you won’t be able to use them. The extra sad part was when Gizmodo said that browsing the image was a slow process. As an approach it seems just braindead - novel and interesting sure, but seemingly doomed to failure. The iPhone’s panning and zooming interface seems much more reasonable of an approach, since you’re keeping everything as html - even if it isn’t awesome to begin with you can see how it could mature into something worthwhile, I just don’t see what Deepfish matures into. So sad. Too bad.
