Well, I didn’t see that coming.
Do you think it’s likely that other browsers could be approved for the iPad?
- Definitely needed to be <em>ed. This is big news!
I saw it coming, I’ve been following Opera’s attempts to get it’s browser into Apple’s store since it’s inception… I think Apple are being smart, their slowly opening up their store more and more to allow for platform development because they can see it’s going to drive more people to the OSX platform if the iPhone and iPad apps are ever ported across. Plus it also means that they don’t put off active developers who may turn to their competition. 
Other browsers have been approved for the iPhone, but they all use Apple’s underlying WebKit to do the rendering. Think of them like all those IE clones with different UIs that were on Windows a few years ago.
As for other browsers like Firefox getting on the iPad/iPhone, doubtful, at least in their current form. Apple won’t approve an app that includes its own script interpreter so Mozilla would have to completely rewrite how their browser works (Opera mini gets around this since all the script interpretation and rendering is done server-side and not on the device).
Opera for iPhone is the bees knees so far as I’m concerned. It’s blindingly fast compared to Safari thanks to the data compression and that means using the web without a 3g connection is a joy again.
Shame there’s no way to set it as the default browser, unless I’m missed where the setting is?
I think it was smart of Opera to process the pages server-side, must use a lot of bandwidth but anything which speeds up data transfer is a great idea in my book.