It truly was the first powerful mobile web browser.
I've been writing enterprise mobile HTML apps since the mid 1990s. Safari Mobile was nicer to use in many ways, but it was not the first full mobile web browser. A lot of people have a mistaken notion that up until then there was only WAP browsers. Nothing could be further from the truth.
- 2000 - IE 4.0 on my Jornada Win CE handheld.
- 2002 - Netfront browser w/ HTML 4.01, CSS2, JS 1.5, and screen dragging.
- 2004 - IE 6.0 on Windows CE enterprise devices.
- 2005 - Minimo came out, a port of Mozilla. Very nice, but slow.
- 2005 - Nokia ported Webkit to Symbian.
- 2006 - Opera Mobile was getting popular.
The Picsel document browser, dating from 2003, and which came on some Samsung smartphones in 2005, especially seemed to influence Safari Mobile.
Like the other browsers mentioned above, it had full page rendering. It also had flick scrolling with inertia, a tap-to-zoom version with blurred view for speed, and miniature pages for history / bookmarks.
In fact, Picsel filed a lawsuit against Apple in 2009, which was dropped soon after... likely because of Apple settling with them. (At least one of Apple's zoom patents referenced Picsel prior art.)
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In some major ways, the Apple team had a much easier task than other mobile browsers. Apple used WebKit internally already. It only had to deal at the start with one resolution. It didn't need to support tiny screens with text reflow, or port to multiple OSes. Most importantly, it didn't need to support devices which only had a cursor pad.