Deepfish

» see labs.live.com/deepfish as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the last words ~

Live Labs was the part of Microsoft allowed to build things that did not have to ship, and Deepfish was one of its more visible attempts. It was announced on 29 March 2007 as a technology preview for Windows Mobile, invite-only, with the download capped because the servers behind it could only take so many people. The pitch was that a phone in 2007 should show you the same page a desktop showed you, at the same layout, with no separate mobile version written for it.

The trick was that the phone was barely doing the browsing. Microsoft's servers fetched the page, laid it out, and streamed down only the part you were currently looking at, so the client was a viewer with a zoom control and a small map in the corner telling you where you were on the page. On a Windows Mobile device from that year, which had a processor measured in a few hundred megahertz, this was the difference between a usable web and a slideshow.

Then Apple shipped the iPhone in June, and Safari on it did the same job with the phone doing its own rendering. Live Labs put up a post on 18 August 2008 titled "Deepfish: Hello, I Must Be Going", which announced that the proxy would be retired and the client would stop working once it was. The date in the notice was September 31. The proxy went off at the end of that month and the browser became an installer that connected to nothing.

~ the record ~

~ what it could not do ~

Because the rendering happened somewhere else, everything that depends on a page being live in front of you was missing. No JavaScript and no cookies, which ruled out form posts and anything ActiveX touched. You could read the web in Deepfish and you could not log into it.

That was defensible in a preview. It was not defensible for a year and a half, and Live Labs never closed the gap, which is the honest reason the project reads as an experiment rather than an unlucky product. The thing being tested was the zooming interface and the server-side layout, and the answer came back from the market rather than from the lab.

~ the phones that got the trick instead ~

Proxy browsing was not a Microsoft idea and it did not die with Deepfish. Opera Mini had been doing the same compression since 2005, on cheap Java phones rather than on business hardware, and that is the version of the idea that actually reached Turkey. Windows Mobile devices here were something a company bought you. A Nokia with a Java runtime was something you already had, and Opera Mini on it turned an expensive GPRS connection into something you could afford to use.

Deepfish stayed invite-only and capped from its first day to its last, so the number of people who ever ran it was small in every country, and most of them found it through a Live Labs blog post rather than through a phone shop.

~ the year it was born into ~

March 2007 was the last moment when a mobile browser could be a research question. The iPhone had been announced in January but not shipped, and the assumption underneath Deepfish, that phones were too weak to render the real web and always would be, was still reasonable engineering rather than a mistake. Eighteen months later it was neither.

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