2. Zoom When You Want To

Since the Skyfire server has already parsed the page, it knows what elements make it up. So when you zoom in (like when you want to read text designed for a PC-sized screen) it can zoom intelligently so you get a whole column of text, all the headlines in a block, or the whole picture, rather than having to scroll back and forth all the time.

However, you don’t have to zoom in to work with a Web page, like you do with almost all other mobile browsers. That’s because you don’t always need to be able to read the text on a Web page. If you're typing in your password on a site or filling in address fields when it’s obvious what goes where or just visiting a page you're very familiar with, you can click links, select Checkboxes, and Radio buttons or start typing into text fields without zooming in at all.

There is a slight delay when you select a field because Skyfire has to connect back to the server before you can type anything. The field is highlighted in red while the connection is made and the cursor appears when you can start typing. However, Skyfire makes up for that since you can click the OK button or press Enter to move on. You can copy and paste in text fields if your smart phone's operating system allows you to do that, but you can’t copy text from Web pages. Also, to copy a link, you have to load it and copy from the Superbar.

Depending on the screen, smaller text is still just about legible, but when you zoom in, it increases in size immediately, instead of waiting for a round trip to the server to get a higher-resolution version (which is a big improvement over the beta).