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Skyfire axes BlackBerry browser in favor of Android

By: , IntoMobile
Wednesday, April 7th, 2010 at 4:54 PM

Bad news BlackBerry fans, the neato browser Skyfire said it is pausing its work on Research In Motion’s platform in order to focus on Android.

Why? Despite RIM having a sizable U.S. market share, Skyfire said the development platform is just not up to snuff.

“The Blackberry developer environment is not as favorable for cutting-edge application development,” Skyfire said on its blog. “The APIs are fragmented and inconsistent, and the Java virtual machine Blackberry requires is not efficient. While Blackberry users are desperate for a better browser – we know, and we hear them – we only want to bring out something that meets our high standards and is truly great.”

The company is hard at work creating a version for Google’s little green robot and its alpha program has already been swamped with interest. We’re working our connections to get a look at this and we should have something relatively soon. I can’t wait for some good old-fashioned Hulu streaming on my Motorola Droid.

BlackBerry users can take solace that they will soon have a revamped browser from RIM itself shortly. This Webkit-based browser should finally give RIM users a browser that’s capable of handling even the roughest Javascript, AJAX, or HTML5. Check out the video below for a demo of RIM’s new browser.

[Via Skyfire]

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About The Author

Marin Perez

Marin Perez has torture tested cell phones and smartphones for industry leaders like CNET and InformationWeek. He remembers when 4G was just a screen on PowerPoint presentations and is fascinated with the amount of innovation out there. Marin has spent a lot of time with BlackBerry and Android but he finally broke down a bought an iPhone to see what all the hype's about. He also has too many tablets.