With the Skyfire Web Browser app, you can watch Flash content on your iPad. There are limitations on what Flash content is available. You still can’t access Flash games or Flash apps, but you can watch Flash videos on many websites. The developers warn that there are limitations even on what videos you can watch – for example, no Hulu, because Hulu won’t allow it. But they say they are adding access to more websites all the time. You’ll need to read the “Need to Know” section on the app description page in iTunes to decide if you want to invest your money in this app. The Skyfire Web Browser for iPad is $4.99; Skyfire Web Browser for iPhone/iPod touch is $2.99 in the iTunes app store.
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iSwifter smokes SkyFire. I own both, and iSwifter is just so much more natural and displays all Flash content on web pages, not just videos.
For my iphone 4 with IOS 4*, Skyfire works as advertised. It will open and run many websites running flash but certainly nowhere near all of them. You click the video, Skyfire ‘analyzes’ it to see if it can run the video, then once it translates it into an iphone-useable signal the video appears on your viewing screen. The user buttons available to you in watching a Youtube or Quicktime video on the iphone are missing – Skyfire gives you start, stop, and pause, that’s it. If you want to scroll ahead to the middle of a video or back by sliding your finger across the screen – that does not exist, you watch the whole video or you stop watching it, nothing in between. The delay time between clicking a video and running it, when it can run one, is typically less than 30 seconds. It is advertised as a general browser but in that regard it is inferior (slower) to Safari. I use Google or Safari and when I find a video that won’t run on the iphone I copy the link to Skyfire and attempt to open it there, and in this regard, as a back-up cut and paste browser, it works very well. Once you have copied link to memory and click the Skyfire browser app button it asks you whether you want to open the link being held in memory, and that’s that. So it’s really not a copy & paste exercise, just copy and hit the Skyfire button and you’re done. Skyfire is not great but it is very good and in my view worth the $ because otherwise you are looking at an iphone with a blank video screen. iswifter may be a better app but it is ipad-only so until then make one for the iphone it is not an option.