SillyDog701

[Antony]

Since open-source extremists gathers and spreads the worst assumption on Apple's decision at the speed of light, it is important to set the record straight: Third party web browsers are not banned in App Store.

It seems that web browsers (apps) would be under carefully examination before it is available in Apple's App Store for the popular iPhone and iPod touch.

Partial list of these new web browsers apps include:
Edge Browser (free)
Incognito ($1.99)
WebMate:Tabbed Browser ($0.99)
Shaking Web ($1.99)

UserAgent: Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; Intel Mac OS X 10.5; en-US; rv:1.9.0.5) Gecko/2008120121 Firefox/3.0.5

[Don_HH2K]

From what I'm reading, the new browsers are only wrappers around the WebKit engine built into the iPhone and iPod touch. So, practically, third-party Web browsers are not banned in the Apple store.

The ban in particular is on software that interprets external code (i.e. HTML and JavaScript). Since these are wrapped around an existing iPhone API to do this, they don't run afoul of the restriction. Loading on, say, Opera or Firefox, with their own rendering engines, would indeed cause trouble.

Think of this a bit like Microsoft restricting any Web browser on the Windows platform to using the built-in rendering engine. Web browsers wouldn't be banned, per se, though self-sufficient Web browsers would indeed be so.

UserAgent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 6.0; en-US; rv:1.9.1b3pre) Gecko/20081226 Shiretoko/3.1b3pre