“Mobile Safari and Opera Mini are both software – the iPhone is hardware, so how about some like-for-like comparisons?”

-Mart

Mobile Safari and Opera are both software – the iPhone so how about some like-for-like comparisons?

Opera is available on hundreds of devices from many manufacturers including phones and PDAs. Mobile Safari is available on 2 devices – iPhone and iPod Touch. Taken together Mobile Safari actually racks up a gob-smacking 50 – 60% of the mobile web browsing market.

http://arstechnica.com/apple/news/2009/06/opera-bests-iphones-mobile-browser-market-shareor-does-it.ars

Also, Opera Mini has been available for 3.5 years almost twice as long as Mobile Safari and has only racked up 25 million downloads in that time versus the 45 million Safari installations on iPhones and iPod touches so one should take press releases like this with a little more discernment.

-Mart

Check your facts before you post.

Actually, there are a dozen or more web browsers available for the iPhone on the App Store. Apple’s only requirement at this point is that they use the webkit engine (which is the same engine used by Symbian, Google Chrome, Android etc), so the story is not nearly as bad as you paint.

Apparently Opera hasn’t actually submitted Opera to the App Store so until they do we don’t know for sure that Apple would reject it.

-Mart

And yeah, HTML5/Canvas is excellent — great way to make beautiful sites for mobile with very little bandwidth.

As a person who sometimes develops graphical content for mobile phones using HTML5 and Canvas element, the “non-cooperation” on part of BB browser is a hurdle.

http://bit.ly/3Qga2
“Therefore, the real barrier to HTML5 adoption is RIM’s Blackberry platform.
Blackberry has its own specialized browser not built on any of the major browser engines. It only recently started handling html, css and javascript reasonably well, but still is insufficient and buggy compared to other browsers.”

First, you write: “Opera Mini is also making Firefox eat dust in the mobile world.” This is not a fair statement, since there is no Firefox for mobile platforms, and Mozilla has not yet released a browser for mobile platforms. It’s no surprise that, in a given market, companies who have entered the market will supplant those who haven’t (yet), right?

This is as if you had written “RIM is making Apple eat dust in the mobile world” six months before Apple entered the market with the iPhone. :/

Then, you write: “Firefox has been promising a full-blown mobile browser for a year”. I follow most updates by Mozilla, and to me it seems that they have repeated for a year that they’re working on it. First as a prototype (there was a test project before Fennec if i remember correctly), then they released alpha, then beta builds for some specific platforms.

Finally, you write: “Mozilla has released Fennec 3, a beta version of its open-source touch mobile browser.”

Mozilla has released the third beta of Fennec 1.0. Not Fennec 3. There hasn’t been a stable release of Fennec yet. And Fennec 1.0 will be the first mobile browser by Mozilla. So, yes, (some interested) users are still waiting, you got that one right.

As Martin says though, it does not support Flash – no idea where you got that from!