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Microsoft Live Labs cancels Deepfish browser project ?
October 21, 2007 | By Edward J. Rutkowski.

Now when Apple iPhone touts full web browsing - with page overview, zooming and full AJAX support - it would make sense for Microsoft to speed up development of Deepfish Internet browser, that also features page overview and swift zooming, but Microsoft is doing the contrary: this browser no longer is available for downlaod, users can't even sign up for Beta version and it looks like this project has been cancelled:

Deepfish technology preview from Microsoft Live Labs. Deepfish is a new type of mobile information browsing experience, aimed at preserving the rich layout and full form of documents on mobile devices while providing novel ways of effectively navigating that content on small screens. Deepfish's unique interface enables you to zoom in and out of page, quickly getting to the areas you are interested in without screen length after screen length of scrolling. And because the layout is preserved, navigation menus, lists of search results or news headlines, and other elements that might have been bent so thoroughly to fit the usual single column layout that they were no longer legible can now be browsed simply and easily. A consequence of Deepfish's multi-resolution approach to browsing pages is that it loads a thumbnail of pages initially and then only what is needed for more detail when requested or in the background as you browse the initial the view, resulting in substantially quicker load times for most pages.

To learn more, visit home page of Deepfish browser.

Conclusion: previously Microsoft announced that XNA development kit will make it possible to develop games for Xbox, PC and Windows Mobile but after it was released the support for Windows Mobile was missing. Later Microsoft released Silverlight and presented short demonstrations of Silverlight player for Windows Mobile but after latest releases of Silverlight it became apparent that versions of Silverlight for Linux and for Mac OS X are available but still nothing for Windows Mobile. The same story happens to Deepfish - the program that could save face of Microsoft if Microsoft would release it immediately to end users of Windows Mobile - instead of putting it on hold. It looks like Microsoft's top management is not taking Windows Mobile seriously...

Another possibility is that Microsoft has cancelled Deepfish browser project because it in reality was not genuine browser but just a viewer of transcoded content. In other words apparently the Deepfish browser itself is not doing the work but it is getting the pages pre-formatted by servers of Microsoft - something similar to Opera Mini operation. To use Deepfish one needs to have user account at Microsoft servers and all content must flow through these servers. If Microsoft decides that given user account is generating too much traffic then Microsoft cuts such account off. Since Safari for Apple iPhone has no such problems and it is not using intermediary servers, probably Microsoft has realized that it needs to add full page viewing and zooming features in regular Pocket Internet Explorer instead of using servers...

Finally, probably such efforts as Opera 9 Mobile and Wake3 probably will bring full web browsing to Windows Mobile much faster than Microsoft itself.

[Via msmobiles.com]