Apple’s Safari, the default browser on the iPhone, iPad and iPod Touch, rules the usage share roost, representing 53% of the mobile browsing market.

Two trends are clear. Phones and tablets are stealing browsing share from desktops at an accelerated pace. - Vince Vizzaccaro, a vice president with metrics firm Net Applications

Users still do nearly all of the their browsing from a desktop or notebook computer, Net Applications’ numbers showed, but that’s changing: A year ago, desktop browsing controlled a 97.2% share, compared to 93.2% in August.

The other trend is Apple’s obvious advantage. In the last 12 months, Safari’s share has increased by 9.3 percentage points, and now owns a majority of the smartphone and tablet browsing market. The clear loser has been Opera Mini, which lost 12.5 points in the same period, reducing its share to 20.8%.

Apple’s iPhone and iPad account for the bulk of Safari’s share, although the former, which has a nearly three-year lead on the latter, remained slightly ahead last month. According to Net Applications, 27.4% of all mobile browsing was done from an iPhone, while 22.5% was conducted on an iPad.

Soundtrack not included.

The latest and greatest version of the Opera Mini web browser for the Apple devices has been just released and can be downloaded via iTunes.

As you might have noticed from the video above, Opera Mini 6 includes a new skin and redesigned menus that should improve the user experience.

However, those are not the only changes.

The following release also brings retina display support for the iPhone 4, iPad and iPad 2 devices as well as super smooth pinch to zoom and panning.

Furthermore, you can now quickly share links with your friends via Facebook, Twitter or My Opera and open new page in the background tab.

For a complete list of changes and download link, visit the iTunes page or m.opera.com.

PocketNow compared some of the most popular handsets web browsing experience.

If you don’t feel like watching the video, then here is a conclusion for you: what happens when you add the 1.2GHz Exynos CPU and 1GB of RAM to a cell phone (Samsung Galaxy S II)? It destroys the competition, that is all.

According to the blog post, it far exceeded their initial expectations and was too much for the servers to handle.

When can you expect it to re-appear?

As soon as they increase the capacity of servers. No ETA yet.

Well, what do you know; Apple has just approved the Skyfire mobile browser for the iOS.

According to CNNMoney.com, it shall be available on Thursday and is priced at $2.99.

Is it any good? Well, the main selling point is this: Skyfire has a built in Flash video to HTML5 converter. Therefore, iPhone, iPod or iPad users will be able to enjoy Flash content. However, don’t get to excited as it won’t convert games or other non-video related content.

In the recent post, Mozilla has answered to one of the most frequently asked questions: Firefox for the iPhone?

We are working to bring as much of your Firefox experience as possible to Firefox Home. People have asked about adding more browser-like features to Firefox Home, but there are technical and logistical restrictions that make it difficult, if not impossible, to build the full Firefox browser for the iPhone. We are focused on building Firefox Home as a rich, cloud-based application and making it a valuable product that people will continue to love and use.

From the answer above, it looks like Mozilla is unable to implement the full Firefox browser experience into the iPhone. However, as company continues to explorer various options and alternatives, we might see something what resembles a mobile web browser.

If Apple approves the app, Skyfire would allow iPhone/iPad users to enjoy Flash content that is being transcoded into HTML5 via company servers.

According to press release, Skyfire Team followed Apple guidelines, including the use of a WebKit browser core shared with Safari, and h.264 adaptive streaming.

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Few weeks ago, Mozilla has submitted Firefox Home to Apple’s App Store and today, it was finally approved.

Here is how to get started (as from blog.mozilla.com):

- Install Firefox Sync, a free add-on for Firefox, on your desktop.
- Restart Firefox and follow prompts to create an account with both a password and a secret phrase.
- Go the App Store on your iPhone and search for “Firefox Home” or install it directly from iTunes.
- Launch Firefox Home on your iPhone. You’ll be prompted to enter your Firefox Sync account info. Enter your username, password and Secret Phrase and tap “Done.”
- Enjoy!

Download.

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As we wrote earlier, Firefox Home is a simple iPhone application (based on Weave Sync), that allows iPhone/iPod Touch and iPad users to access their Firefox browsing history, bookmarks and tabs from their most recent browsing session.

Furthermore, it allows you to use Awesome Bar without Firefox browser itself.

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