Apple Allows New Browsers on iPhone

The company has eased up on its dictatorial app stance a bit and allowed access to browsers that challenge its own Safari.

Safari is no longer the only window to the Web for iPhone users. Apple relaxed its stranglehold on the iPhone browser earlier this week when it allowed a handful of Safari alternatives to squeek into the app store.

In the past, Apple had abolished all other browsers from its app store, citing “duplicate functionality,” since Safari came preinstalled on all iPhones. But now Apple has quietly reversed that stance, allowing four different browsers built on Safari to begin selling through the store.

Edge Browser, Incognito, WebMate and Shaking Web all offer some sort of functionality above and beyond what can be found in Apple’s vanilla Web browser. The $2 app Incognito, for instance, allows browsing without a trail of cookies and history, while WebMate helps users deal with the phone’s somewhat sluggish load times by allowing them to queue up links as they read an article, then read them later when they’ve loaded.

So far, major Safari competitors like Firefox, Internet Explorer, Chrome and Opera have yet to appear for download, and Apple hasn’t specified which criteria it’s using to allow new browsers through.