Apple Lets Alternative Browsers Onto the iPhone. Sort of!

By  |  Wednesday, January 14, 2009 at 9:06 am

iphone4The single worst thing about Apple’s capricious iPhone App Store policies has probably been the fact that it’s rejected some applications on the grounds that they compete with Apple’s own offerings–including third-party browsers. Now the company is approving some alternative browsers, including Edge Browser (a browser without space-hogging navigation bars), Incognito (private browsing), Shaking Web (which compensates for shaky hands by adjusting the display), and WebMate:Tabbed Browser (which queues up links in new tabs). The one thing all these apps have in common is that they’re really reskinned versions of Safari, Apple’s own browser. I suspect that it’ll be a long time until Apple allows Firefox or Opera or any other true Safari rival onto the iPhone; I’d love to be proven wrong, though…

 
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3 Comments For This Post

  1. Aktariel Says:
    January 14th, 2009 at 2:09 pm

    Can has Fennec, plx? kthxbai.

    No seriously. I doubt that Apple will ever allow any browser that isn’t simply a Safari reskin, or at most WebKit based, to be on the iPhone.

    Which is a shame, because it means that jailbreakers get the goods, like always. Except, of course, that there isn’t as much impetus to develop a version of, say, Fennec for the iPhone, since the userbase is nowhere near as large.

  2. EddyKilowatt Says:
    January 15th, 2009 at 2:59 pm

    A better browser would certainly be up there on my list of could-be-betters… along with copy/paste and a sideways (landscape) keyboard in email and other text apps.

    And my definition of ‘better’ is pretty minimal. How about a cache for starters? Waiting for re-load of a page you just surfed away from ten seconds ago gives lots of time to contemplate the lameness of whoever configured the iPhone’s browser…

    Eddy

  3. ifoneguy Says:
    January 5th, 2010 at 1:38 pm

    I need alternate browser for the fact that safari wont open some sites. Such as officelive.com.

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  1. Opera on the iPhone? Maybe. Someday. | Technologizer Says:
    January 14th, 2009 at 1:54 pm

    […] company has opened the floodgates for Safari rivals to make their way onto iPhones. Not true–the new apps all use Safari’s WebKit rendering engine and are therefore piggybacking on Safari rather than trying to replace it. But I happened to have a […]