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Apple Allows 3rd Party Web Browsers in App Store

I just bought WebMate and gave it a test. Man, I love it. It is TONS faster than Safari. I think I won't be using Safari anymore.

Thank you RPA Tech! :)

EDIT:
People, even so though they might be using the same browsing tech, give them a spin... Like I said, WebMate renders the pages a lot quicker. Yes, the initial page.
 
kdarling said:
Amazing how news gets copied and warped around the blogosphere over something as simple as this.

There are even websites claiming that the "new" browsers can't possibly be as good as Safari's webkit. Idiots. It *is* Safari inside.

At least Gizmodo got it right:

Apple approves Safari apps

I guarantee a flood gate has opened, too. These kind of apps are fairly quick and simple to write.
Click to expand...

He is right. :(

Multiple copies of the same freaking safari application just with different dressing. *iYawn*
 
TuffLuffJimmy said:
Except the biggest flaw in your logic (this makes every point you made invalid and you completely wrong) is that most, if not all apps needed to be updated in order to run on 2.2

So what's the difference between waiting for a native photoshop and waiting for a working Pandora app?
Click to expand...

I'm not sure what you mean? All my apps worked fine after I updated to 2.2. I didn't know any "needed" to be updated in order to upgrade to 2.2. My Pandora was working fine as well...
 
It's silly to have 20 different browsers, each with only a one or at most a couple features:

edge browser
1password
incognito
etc.

They really need to open up a plugin interface to Safari.
So I could have 1password and incognito and an edge browsing options, etc., all at the same time if I want.

I mean, duh. It's not like I'm suggesting something radical here.
 
Wow, this thread is getting pretty long. I didn't read every single post, but even though these are just front-end UI's for Safari's WebKit, up until now, you couldn't get a standalone Web Browser app on the App Store. Apple would say that it mimic's the already built-in Safari and wouldn't allow it. This is pretty good news. Maybe we'll see some browsers with better features than Safari and perhaps we'll see some email clients as well.

Someone should make a Safari clone that has the old pre-2.2 interface. I don't like the new Google search bar in my face all the time now... ugh.
 
i love Webmate too. It does scroll a little more jittery than Safari and I cant seem to find a way to Add bookmarks.

Am I missing something?
 
bytethese said:
I'm not sure what you mean? All my apps worked fine after I updated to 2.2. I didn't know any "needed" to be updated in order to upgrade to 2.2. My Pandora was working fine as well...
Click to expand...

That's probably because the developers got their updates out the door very quickly, but none the less there were issues with 2.1 apps on 2.2
 
Damn, i was so happy to see my app finally approved after 2 months, only to see all of these appear.. :(

I think i will go into a marathon of new features for my app in the next few days to try to get ahead.

So if anyone has any Safari missing feature they would like, i'd be glad to hear.
Appname: QuickSurf.

Currently the main features over Safari are:
- Total full screen mode toggle (Including status bar)
- Toggle download of images on/off for faster browsing

Next version (Which hopefully will be approved quickly now) will include:
- Ad Blocker toggle (All known ad-servers will be blocked)
- Orientation Lock (Lock the current orientation to landscape or portrait, someone mentioned in this thread)

More ideas would be appreciated (Reasonable ones, not flash support :) unless you already have the code for it)

Thanks
 
I gotta play devil's advocate for a second here... let's say Apple did lax some of their policies and Mozilla got Gecko (and subsequently Firefox) onto the iPhone. How good will it be?

All the cool plugins for Firefox would probably not be available in any shape or form. And I'm sure they would probably botch a few "minor" details that just end up hurting the use experience—double tap, panning around, pinch, font rendering (they can't even get that right on the Mac); it just wouldn't work the same as Safari. Apple's spent a lot of time getting these things right and I don't blame them for wanting to protect the iPhone's user experience. Is that would people are after—a clunky user experience? I use Firefox for development—the plugins are awesome—but as a day to day browser... not so much.

When Apple was shopping around for a rendering engine, they chose KHTML for a reason—the codebase was (and probably still is) way leaner than Gecko which made it ideal for mobile devices. Even if you could get some form of Firefox on the iPhone, it would need to be stripped down and most likely slow.

And Flash is never coming to the iPhone. It's a resource hog—even Flash "Lite"—and doesn't fit the iPhone's touch screen tap/multitouch paradigm.
 
I think apple should allow any app that won't break the iPhone, that is where its focus should be. Not so much if it competes with its prebuilt in functionality. Allow Java and Flash, Other developer tools/runtime other then Objective C. I would say put a warning on the Apple store about apps that could be misused. Say an app that allows you get apps form untrusted sources. But I don't like the tight control of apps. It really should allow anything in and out.
 
I'm not sure if apple won't still limit what these browsers can do, though. Apple absolutely hates flash, so will they allow a browser with a built in flash player? I'm not so sure.

Anyways though, I'm sure we'll see opera soon. Didn't they have an app store-ready version quite awhile ago?
 
MacWorld is now reporting that ONLY Webkit based browsers will be allowed. In other words, Apple will continue to block Firefox, Opera, etc. as competing with their own favored engine, Webkit. How is that relaxing anything? Those approved browsers are just another clone of Safari in disguise.
 
jellomizer said:
Development testing your site for multiple mobile devices, on small screen.
Click to expand...
One of the benefits of actually using Safari (to a developer at least) is your site essentially renders like it does on the desktop unless you explicitly define an iPhone version. Jobs mentioned this is the full, not "watered down Internet". It always pisses me off to go to various websites and they detect mobile safari so they show me a "mobile" version Mosaic 15 years might have rendered. (The reverse is also true—developers making an iPhone-only version of the site not renderable on the desktop—which is annoying.)

And for some web applications, Apple has hooks inside Webkit for rendering on the iPhone, specifically for mobile development—such as transitions, interaction with the calling features, etc. I don't think developers are going to spend much time (if any) with browsers other than Safari—especially if they rely on those features.

I suppose someone people might claim "monopoly!" and demand other browsers to be on the device but this is both Apple's hardware and software.
 
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