At long last, we released Skweezer 4.0 to the public last night at 8 PM Pacific time. Press release here. This is a moment of great pride for us since the team has been working on this since February and the launch went about as smoothly as possible. After 26 hours and only two minor patches today, I can confidently say it’s good and there’s no going back. This release reaffirms our commitment to providing the best mobile browsing experience anywhere, and I think we have decisively retaken our lead on mobile transcoding. This was a re-write from the ground up, and while we’ve changed a few things you can see, the most exciting thing to me is how this new version positions us for future enhancements, not to mention a performance boost across the board.
While I intend to write more in depth about my favorite features and the technical background, here are a few things that are different:
- Action-oriented home page. There used to be a “Skweeze box” front and center on the home page, followed by directory links and favorites if you were logged in. While it took some guts to remove that box from the home page (it’s been a constant feature since v1.0), I think the result is a better phone experience.
- Dynamic Images. By determining the client device’s screen size, we are able to resize images on our server and send the smaller, optimized version. I’ve seen some images come out 5% of the original size. I really want to talk more about the technical details of this, but I’ll save that for a later post.
- New search engine. Before, we detected search queries (as opposed to direct navigating to a website) and would skweeze a search engine’s results page. Granted the user could choose the default search engine, but it was less than ideal. Now that we’re using third-party APIs we can exert more control of the output, which means search results are more mobile-friendly.
- Find in page and phone numbers. On the first page of your search result destination, you can skip to the first occurrence of any search term, which will be highlighted. If you’re browsing through a phone that we support, we will try to link 10-digit phone numbers. These are new and sort of rough features, but rather than wait until they’re perfect, we thought we’d incorporate them now and see what you think.
- New directory. More sites and languages and a better back-end system will allow faster turnaround to incorporate suggestions, although currently “suggest a site” is behaving oddly, and we’ll get that ironed out this week for sure.
- Japanese UI. One of the newest members to our team recently translated the UI into Japanese, and this is just in time since our Japanese usage has been growing quite a bit lately. To all our new Japanese guests, ようこそ!
- Mail is gone. This isn’t in the press release because it’s a dropped feature, but we decided to discontinue the mobile e-mail feature from Skweezer. We simply weren’t able to devote the attention to it that it deserved, and it never caught on with more than a very small percentage of users. If ever Greenlight Wireless gets back into mobile e-mail, I think it will be a separate product or site from Skweezer. If you were one of them, I’m sorry.
- Mobile site bypass. For sites that are already mobilized, Skweezer should leave them mostly intact. We now send through the original user agent, so for sites that present a mobile alternative, this will let them do so.
- Self-explanatory desktop interface. It is difficult to describe the function of Skweezer in five words or less. If you visit Skweezer on your desktop browser, however, you’ll see the new narrow interface, and it should be more obvious what’s going on.
Wow, I meant to keep that list shorter. There are still some rough edges that only live traffic will expose (please use the feedback form in Skweezer if you see problems), but I’m confident in the overall quality. I want to thank our customers, partners, testers, end-users and investors for their continued support. We sincerely hope that Skweezer 4.0 will help bring the desktop web to even more mobile devices.
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