Deepfish was an experimental browsing software system for
Windows Mobile
Windows Mobile is a discontinued family of mobile operating systems developed by Microsoft for smartphones and personal digital assistants.
Its origin dated back to Windows CE in 1996, though Windows Mobile itself first appeared in 2000 as Pock ...
devices that used a
zooming user interface
In computing, a zooming user interface or zoomable user interface (ZUI, pronounced zoo-ee) is a graphical environment where users can change the scale of the viewed area in order to see more detail or less, and browse through different document ...
, being developed at
Microsoft Live Labs
Microsoft Live Labs was a partnership between MSN and Microsoft Research that focused on applied research for Internet products and services at Microsoft. Live Labs was headed by Dr. Gary William Flake, who prior to joining Microsoft was a princi ...
. It aimed to provide a consistent browsing experience on desktops and mobile devices, to display content on the small mobile displays in the same layout as larger displays, and to avoid the need to recode the web-page for small displays.
When a page was opened, it appeared zoomed-out and shrunk, and formatted as would be in a desktop browser. The user could zoom into the certain areas of the page by using a selection rectangle, and pan the zoomed-in page.
Deepfish consisted of a light-weight browser client powered by a server backend which does most of the processing. The server streams only the data that is visible at any moment, which improves load times and responsiveness. Despite the increased speed in Deepfish, it's quite bandwidth heavy and can render pages slowly if it were launched on a device with lower specifications. Whenever a user would zoom in, the zoomed-in high quality has to be downloaded from the server.
The browser was available for preview until a limited number of reviewers had participated.
Deepfish was retired on 30 September 2008 while important features including
JavaScript
JavaScript (), often abbreviated as JS, is a programming language that is one of the core technologies of the World Wide Web, alongside HTML and CSS. As of 2022, 98% of websites use JavaScript on the client side for webpage behavior, of ...
, AJAX, cookies, ActiveX controls and HTTP POST were not implemented.
See also
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Microsoft Live Labs
Microsoft Live Labs was a partnership between MSN and Microsoft Research that focused on applied research for Internet products and services at Microsoft. Live Labs was headed by Dr. Gary William Flake, who prior to joining Microsoft was a princi ...
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Windows Mobile
Windows Mobile is a discontinued family of mobile operating systems developed by Microsoft for smartphones and personal digital assistants.
Its origin dated back to Windows CE in 1996, though Windows Mobile itself first appeared in 2000 as Pock ...
References
External links
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Deepfish
Windows Mobile Standard software
Pocket PC software
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