A short while back, Skyfire acquired Kolbysoft, who were the developers of one of the most popular Android browsers, Steel. This release is the result.
The big draw of Skyfire is that it transcodes flash video using its own servers, then makes it available to your phone in a format the phone can play back without needing any plugins. So those with Android phones that'll never support Flash 10.1 (like me, with my G1) can still get integrated video playback to some extent. But not every video is supported, so it's still not as good as the real thing.
Other versions of Skyfire actually run ALL web content through their own servers, then compress it, much like Opera Mini does. But with the Android version, only items that need to be transcoded go through proxies...the rest is directly accessed. This means that Skyfire's page load times aren't as great as Opera Mini's. And actually, in my experience on my G1, they're not as good as the default Android browser, either. But I'll chalk that up to the Beta condition.
Most of the other features Skyfire offers are gimmicky IMO, and I'll never use them. Crap like "social browsing" which allows you to quickly share links via Facebook, SMS, email, etc. are things I'd never thing to use, let alone care to have taking up toolbar space on my browser. And the "Explore" feature that finds similar pages to the one you're browsing doesn't really work well at all in practice in addition to being another feature I'd rather not have another button for.
There is one useful feature, though: the ability to change how your browser appears to websites in order to quickly and easily alter the page format you load on the fly. I personally HATE mobile pages, especially considering how amazingly horrible some of them are (Kotaku, I'm looking at you--going through 9 times as many links to read the same article IS NOT AN IMPROVEMENT!), so I really like this feature. But, considering that mobile pages almost always omit video content, you won't want to browse in either mobile setting (Android or iPhone) anyway, since it'll lock you out of using the browser's best feature.
Another thing that made me scowl was the not-really-speed-dial homepage. The browser's homepage defaults to a Skyfire page with a collection of (obviously sponsored) links to a bunch of crap I don't care about. It LOOKS like Opera's speed dial, but you can't change what appears, because it's really just a static webpage. You still have to access your bookmarks the same way you do with the default Android browser.
But, at least Skyfire (unlike Opera
) can be set as the default browser. Then again, considering how slowly the program (not just page loads) runs on my G1, I'm not likely to do that with the current Beta release. If it speeds up, I'm all for making it my default as it's a general improvement over the default browser. But it takes far too long to start up at the moment, and even switching from it to other programs and back takes ages.So don't uninstall Opera Mini yet, but keep Skyfire on hand for integrated video features.