Four third-party Web browsers appear on Apple's App Store
The move is surprising given that the iPhone maker has shown resistance in the past to accepting new applications to its digital software store that replicate any of the core functionalities of its handheld products, such as their built-in Safari web browser or ability to download podcasts over the air.
In each case, the four accepted browsers — Edge Browser, Webmate, Incognito, and Shaking Web — are based on Apple's Webkit framework, the same set of libraries that make up the foundation of the company's Safari and mobile Safari browsers.
Firefox and Opera, two other third-party browsers that rely on their own rendering engines and frameworks, have unsurprisingly failed to gain App Store acceptance. The terms of Apple's iPhone SDK, the development kit that allows developers to author apps for the iPhone and iPod touch, specifically forbids applications that call on non-Apple frameworks and languages.
A preview of the four new browsers follows:
Edge Browser
Edge Browser (Free, App Store) bills itself as a Safari web browser that does not sacrifice screen real estate to to address or navigational bars. To enter a URL, however, you must navigate to the iPhone's settings dialog. As such, the app has been met with poor reviews.
Webmate
Webmate ($0.99, App Store) prides itself on delivering a more natural tabbed browsing experience than the iPhone's built in Safari web browser. As any iPhone user can attest, tabbed browsing in Safari is a time consuming experience given that each time you bring a tab into view, the contents of the tab must reload.
Designed specifically for readers of news sites, Webmate mitigates this problem by queuing up the contents of each link you click on into a new tab that loads in the background. You can then cycle through those tabs at any point without having to wait for their contents to reload.
Incognito
Incognito ($1.99, App Store) is an anonymous web browser for the iPhone and iPod touch that lets you browse the web without leaving a history of any kind. When you close the browser, Incognito will erase the entire session. This way, you won't have to clear Safariâs history just to hide a single entry, which renders the URL auto-completion useless.
The browser includes full, anonymous support for linked media files, including all videos and sound files played by mobile Safari, as well as an orientation lock mode and a customizable homepage.
Shaking Web
Shaking Web ($1.99, App Store) was conceived with the idea of making it easy to read webpages when you're moving, such as commuting by bus, train or car. When your hands move due to general body movement, the app senses the movement and applies a slight but opposite movement to the content area, with the goal of keeping the reading "where your eyes are."
The app currently features two modes: Turbo Off, which applies force only on vertical movements, and Turbo On, which applies force on both vertical and horizontal movements. The browser allows only one web page to be viewed at a time and does not support pop-up windows.
31 Comments
Well, here comes the folks screaming for Firefox and Opera on iPhone (they'll just be louder now). Those four offerings range from zero utility (Edge Browser) to moderate utility (Webmate). However, the pricing might be a hard sell for a lot of end users when they have Safari right here. I'd like to see how any of these are selling in a few weeks, once the initial fervor has died down.
Palm Pre seems to be shaking some feathers.
I really wish Apple would be a little more friendly to developers...these abrupt turnarounds only help to highlight the arbitrary nature of Apple's absurd regulations...
Palm Pre seems to be shaking some feathers.
I'm not quite sure how you reached that conclusion. Android didn't create this reaction. The timing has got to be coincidental. If Apple was really worried about the Pre's (eventual) release, they would have been inviting Opera and Mozilla to build and submit their own browsers well before flipping the switch on these four marginal apps.
I'm not quite sure how you reached that conclusion. Android didn't create this reaction. The timing has got to be coincidental. If Apple was really worried about the Pre's (eventual) release, they would have been inviting Opera and Mozilla to build and submit their own browsers well before flipping the switch on these four marginal apps.
Yeah, all these browsers were just in the same queue waiting for approval, and have been for a long time. Nothing to do with Palm pre at all.
What I fail to understand (and I don't think the advocates are even thinking clearly here), is why people are so hot for browser alternatives on iPhone anyway. The main differentiating factors of browsers are the engines underlying the project and the UI.
On iPhone, there won't be enough room or processing power for multiple rendering engines for a long time, and none of the alternative rendering engines are not as good as WebKit which is "built in." Also, the UI for all programs on the iPhone is minimal, but most Safari alternatives on the desktop are famous for their unique and rather busy interfaces. Mobile Safari only has one tool bar and a place to put the URL, how can that really be done significantly differently as to be worth installing a separate browser?
Finally, Mobile Safari's appearance and functionality could be easily changed with a plug-in. A developer would have more success, (and the product would be more useful to the end user), if they focussed on developing mobile Safari plug-ins, not trying to reinvent a wheel that already is in the box.