Mobile Safari has shipped on over 40 million devices since mid-2007

It totally dominates all other mobile browsers in real-world stats -- people actually use it, and that's what's important. Opera's piddling marketshare in terms of actual usage (along with their historically odd JS engine, and mobile reformatting proxy) has meant that major players (like Google) totally ignored their browsers for years.

> [Mobile Safari] totally dominates all other mobile browsers in real-world stats -- people actually use it.

Saying that Mobile Safari dominates mobile browsing seems a bit self-defeating -- of course Safari is going to dominate if the iPhone is the crowd favourite for mobile web browsing and Apple only allows one browser on the iPhone.

My question is whether or not those mobile-browser statistics would change very much if Apple allowed 3rd-party browsers on the iPhone.* Then we'd get a good idea of how good Mobile Safari is.

* Let's get this out of the way straight-up: Apple doesn't have to allow another browser into the store, but I'm proposing a hypothetical scenario in which they do.

Apple halo is in full effect here obviously. The power of the Apple brand is quite awesome to behold, but it's also very sad to see people trying to tarnish the reputation of competitive products that are, objectively, good.

There's nothing wrong with Opera Mobile, but simultaneously, there's nothing "better than Mobile Safari" about it. Both render HTML/CSS equally well, and both are accessible and usable. It's not that Opera Mobile is worse than Safari, it's that it's not that much better.

Well, the fact is that Apples browser does show up in a significant portion of mobile sites. The stats have been posted all over the place, including here. Can look it up for you if you really don't believe this.

You're right - Opera is objectively good, but WebKit is objectively great

It mostly runs on those devices because it's what's shipped on those devices. I can't install IE/Safari/whatever on my DS or non-smartphone. No offense to Opera, but no one I know (or have heard of) picked a product because it came with Opera (unless it was in a "anything but Mobile IE" sense).