Mobile landgrab: Microsoft releases Deepfish, follows Minimo Project

Jockeying for control of the so-called third screen is intensifying, now that most people are carrying around a phone with them, and will consume more and more information from them.

The move to the cellphone may be one of the biggest trends of the decade.

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Microsoft has just released Deepfish, a browser that aims to preserve the layout of documents on mobile devices and making Web navigation more easy — enabling you to zoom in and out of a page, and downloading only areas you are interested in. It uploads a thumbnail of pages initially (see image below), and keeps navigation menus, lists of search results or news headlines more intact. It has limited its client release for now; we tried to sign up but were shut out.

It is an answer to the popular Opera mobile browser, which has shown momentum lately. It also follows the release Tuesday by the Minimo Project of another browser (hosted by Mozilla) that boasts faster access, support for modern web standards Javascript and AJAX, some of which Deepfish doesn’t have yet, and things like social bookmarking, tag browsing and RSS support (but still looks like it has some way to go).