Third party browsers on iPhone may open door for Opera

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Mobile Industry & Technology Journalist - freelance

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Third party browsers on iPhone may open door for Opera

By CAROLINE GABRIEL

Published: 19 January, 2009

READ MORE: Browsers | iPhone

The mobile browser is one of the most hotly contested battles in the war to control the mobile web, but major players face the dilemma of whether to push their own product or attract users with support for the widest range of options. Google is developing Chrome, which will turn up on Android; Nokia has a mixed strategy, enhancing its own Series 60 software ready for the open source world, but working with Opera on Series 40; Microsoft and Apple cling firmly to their own systems. Until now, that is, with Apple reported to be allowing third party browsers on to the iPhone at last, which could pave the way for the most prominent third party option, Opera, to storm the Apple fortress.

Apple has made no official announcements, but four browsers are now seen in the App Store, which formerly would have banned such products as "duplicating functionality" (ie being directly competitive with the vendor's own preinstalled Safari). The quartet consists of Edge Browser, Incognito, WebMate and Shaking Web - none likely to change the balance of power in iPhone land, and several are actually Safari plug-ins.

But they could open the door to the more disruptive Opera or Mozilla's mobile version of Firefox, Fennec. This is a hint, like talk of Adobe Flash finally coming to the iPhone this year, that Apple will have to open its closely guarded software environment somewhat during 2009 in order to maintain its momentum against Android, Symbian and even Palm.

Opera knows it faces a major challenge from preinstalled vendor browsers, and has broadened its scope to tap into lower end webphones for emerging markets, where many carriers are happy to work with a third party to save development resources and time to market.

The Opera issue highlights the dilemma between well established browsers highly optimized for cellphones, or those designed to take advantage of the specific platform, such as iPhone. So while Safari is generally popular with iPhone users, it lacks many features that are taken for granted by advanced users of Opera or even Internet Explorer Mobile - for instance, it lacks copy/paste, caching, page saving, and of course Flash.

Meanwhile, the European Commission has launched a probe into potential antitrust actions by Microsoft, in bundling Internet Explorer with Windows - almost a rerun of the Netscape inspired lawsuits of a decade ago. The same could be said of Apple with Mac OS X and Safari, and some of Google's plans for Android-based services, but these do not yet have the market share of IE on the PC (though, of course, not the mobile).