Mobile browsing is seen as the promise (and sometimes bane) of mobile content…while Apple’s (NSDQ: AAPL) Safari browser garnered a lot of attention for its “new features”, it was pointed out that other browsers had those features quite a while before. Laptop has done a not-very-scientific test of 3 mobile browsers—the Apple Safari on a 3G iPhone, Opera 9.5.1 beta and Skyfire beta on an AT&T (NYSE: T) Tilt. The results show a significant difference between Skyfire (fastest) Safari (second fastest) and Opera (slowest). One of the big things to come out of it are all the disclaimers which need to be added, which show that which mobile browser you should (or can) use depends on which phone you have. For example, Safari is twice as fast as Opera, but you need an iPhone. Opera probably runs on the most number of handsets and has more features than Skyfire, but is slower…so how much do you want those extra features? As Gizmodo points out Skyfire is server assisted, so a fairer comparison would have been with Opera Mini which also preformats web pages on a server before sending to the handset. The upshot is that if you make a conscious decision as to which mobile browser to use, it’s going to depend on your handset and what sort of browsing you like to do, and the upshot of that is that the mobile browser market is likely to remain a lot more fragmented than the desktop browsing market.