Norway’s Opera Software overtook Apple’s iPhone browser in May as the most popular mobile browser in the world, Web analytics firm StatCounter said on Tuesday

Of all Internet pages that were downloaded to mobile devices globally in May, 24.6 percent were downloaded through Opera’s browser and 22.3 percent via iPhone, StatCounter said.

It has been a competitive year in the mobile web space. Opera and Mobile Safari have teetered back and forth for first place all year with Nokia keeping third. We might see Opera have a solid lead if they can develop a browser for webOS.

UPDATE: @reneritchie asks a really good question:

My initial reaction to the Reuters story was: Um, doesn’t Opera make 2 handset browsers? Was it Mobile or Mini. What. Up?

I would like to see how that breaks down between Opera Mobile and Mini. Something tells me if it was just Smartphone traffic, which this does not appear to be the case, then our beloved iPhone would most definitely take the cake.

Via Reuters