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Comment by MrJagil | Hacker News Reader

Will it eventually be available on iOS?

No. Apple currently don’t allow any browser engines apart from their standardised WebKit on iOS. This is why you can’t currently get Opera or Firefox on iOS (leaving aside Opera Mini which skirts the rules by running the engine on a proxy server).

not correct, if Google ports their features back to Webkit and they are accepted by the Webkit project than yes you will see it on iOS as Apple uses the Webkit project.

But won't the engines have to be identical? Won't Chrome have to use the exact same engine/version as Mobile Safari? Chrome for Android actually uses a newer version of Webkit than Mobile Safari, according to Anandtech, and it has a higher HTML5 score.

And what about V8 and all the other features? Or they only have to use the same rendering engine?

V8, as an interpreter of downloadable code (JavaScript), is explicitly and intentionally forbidden by Apple's rules for their app store.

> and they are accepted by the Webkit project

No, Apple doesn't implement every feature that is pushed to WebKit, they maintain their own fork like everyone else.

Does Apple allow any "full browser" on iOS? Opera Mini and Skyfire don't count.

I figure Firefox and Opera Mobile would've been there by now if they did.

Also wondering about WP7. Right now it's clearly a non-starter, but there do seem to be plans afoot for a native SDK. Assuming that happens at some point, would an alternative browser be possible?

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