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Mozilla Exec Claims Apple is Hunting OSS Browsers
Rob writes with a link to a Computer Business Review article on the negative impact Mozilla COO John Lilly sees Apple is having on Open Source. Lilly claims that Jobs' recent discussion of Safari on Windows is an attempt to create a duopoly of browsers (IE and Safari), with Firefox and the rest on the outside looking in. "The graph 'betrays the way that Apple, so often looks at the world,' Lilly said. 'But make no mistake: this wasn't a careless presentation, or an accidental omission of all the other browsers out there, or even a crummy marketing trick,' he said. 'Lots of words describe Steve and his Stevenotes, but 'careless' and 'accidental' do not. This is, essentially, the way they're thinking about the problem, and shows the users they want to pick up.'" We discussed an analyst's opinion on this subject this past Friday.
Apple's introducing a superior browser to Windows, therefore they're trying to weasel out Mozilla/Firefox? If they really want the market share, make Firefox 3 worth going back to, and I, for one, will start using FF again.
Didn't work in the 80's, won't work now. Customers, markets & data want to be free. We ignored them then and they almost went away. Same trick will work again.
Instead of Microsoft following Apple's lead, Apple is following Microsoft. What a concept!
Gee, I hope its as user friendly as iTunes. I simply live to see the message "You cannot use iTunes because another user is running a copy". That's user friendliness right there.
Athletic Scholarships to universities make as much sense as academic scholarships to sports teams.
Great, that was fun (and completely useless). Can we have one talk about the internal motivations of Microsoft next?
the toughest thing about switching to apple is to tell your mom that you are gay.. but seriously, whats there to be embarrassed about in using apple prods?
However, Job's thinking was outdated, in part because the web "belonged to people and not companies."
good competition, he shouldnt have whined.. Why opera doesnt get a mention at all, but that doesnt discount the fact that it is an awesome and revolutionary browser
In computing, you can be successful as #2, but the #3 player usually loses out and disappears. (Remember Amiga? Commodore? DEC? Ask Jeeves?) If Apple wants their browser to have any commercial significance, they have to pass Firefox.
release the source code to the Safari web browser under the BSD or GPLv2 license and let the developing community contribute and improve it, it cant hurt and in most cases help...
Politics is Treachery, Religion is Brainwashing
Safari is even less enticing on Windows than it is in its native environment.
"He who can destroy a thing, controls a thing." --Paul Atreides, Dune
I find it hard to believe that Apple, which from time to time is king of marketing, seriously believes that the browser battle is between just itself and IE. It's no doubt well aware FireFox is number 2, and Safari is close to last, in terms of market share. Instead, this is Apple trying to create the illusion that it really is the big dangerous new browser on the block, and create the perception of market dominance and leadership. I don't think it will work, and this is likely to make Apple look foolish in the eyes of the non-default to IE market, but that's what Apple is trying to do with these silly charts and pronouncements.
Slashdot: Playing Favorites Since 1997
I mean these are the guys who came out with the first 64 bit PC right :P
They give no credit to others as a rule.
I love my mac, but I don't expect them to acknowledge their competitors
beat them to the finish.
Garick
and installed both Firefox and Thunderbird after about a week of owning the thing. The MBP is great, but iMail & Safari are pretty weak. I don't think Mozilla has anything to worry about.
"Public company aggressively pursues marketshare!"
Film at 11.
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Obviously, they're targeting the browser that most people are familiar with. Even with the progress that FF has made, IE still has the overwhelming percentage of the market, so that's what Apple was comparing themselves to. It would be like Creative complaining that the Zune isn't marketed as a Zen-killer.
Get over it, take close to 50% marketshare, and then you'll be in the comparison.
It's really all pretty pointless, though, because I don't think the point of Safari on Windows is really to gain marketshare, I think it's just for developing iPhone apps. But that doesn't stop the FF guys from being offended.
Meanwhile, Abraxor has taken available data and projected that Firefox will overtake IE in August...
We're on a Safari and we're hunting OSS browsers. (slaps self) I mean we're developing Safari and HURTING OSS browsers.
Yeah, a linear projection, how astute. So in 10 years, FF will have a 12,000% market share?
How last century. These days it's all YouTube Video Right Now.
Best Slashdot Co
From Apple's web site:
"Safari uses open source software -- for its web page rendering engine, Safari draws on KHTML and KJS software from the KDE open source project. Being a good open source citizen, Apple shares its enhancements with the open source community"
"Mozilla Exec Claims Apple is Hunting OSS Browsers". Perhaps they could help Apple find one?
From the TFA
:P
The exec also highlighted Mozilla's attitude about market share: "We've never ever at Mozilla said that we care about Firefox market share at the expense of our more important goal: to keep the web open and a public resource,"
I don't see how Safari and IE will be causing problems. The nature of the web/internet is that it's open (except in extreme cases, of course). If Apple/MS does something nasty, the community will cry foul and move to an alternative, or make one themselves. Isn't that how mozilla got started?
Personally, I'm more worried about careless legislation and government regulation, and politicians who may still refer to the web as the Information Superhighway. yeah, I'd trust those guys to be in charge
Given the buggy release of the Windows port of Safari, that would not surprise me.
Sorry me so sorry :( quote from article ends on first paragraph.
RTFA. They don't want the market share. They want to keep the web open, as stated in the Mozilla Manifesto.
Anyway, they do have the market share. Apple releasing Safari for Windows will increase consumer choice and the competition will help all browsers improve. It will also help web developers realize they can't develop for only one or two browsers, but instead should develop according to standards unless they want to turn away significant fractions of visitors. I see only good coming out of the release, regardless of what Jobs' intentions are.
What a fool believes, he sees, no wise man has the power to reason away.
What that data seems to projects is that FF may overtake IE6 ... whose numbers seem to be dropping mostly because of the people switching to IE7 . IE6/7 still has a comfortable lead over FF.
If Safari turns out to be better than Firefox, they deserve to take their marketshare. If not, well, Apple deserves to see this fall flat on its face. But I guess "OMG teh evils corporashuns!!11!" is likely to attract more readers...
You have a better projection to show off then? No?
What if the Hokey Pokey really is what it's all about?
Every time I point out Apple's brutally monopolistic worldview, my posts get modded down. Therefore, we should all agree that Mozilla now has zero Slashdot credibility, because they dare say something bad about Dear Lord and Master, Apple.
Down with FOSS!! Long live Apple!! Buggy and insecure applications and steeply overpriced hardware for all!!
This is all a tempest in a teapot. Safari on Windows is not going to harm OSS browsers any more than Opera does. There is no reason to think that Safari is going to displace Firefox (or Konqueror or whatever). The users of those apps use them because they had a choice and found a product they liked.
Remember: more competition is always a good thing.
By the way, Safari isn't even the best browser on OS X (that honour goes to Camino) so I really can't see how it will have much impact on Windows.
This graph was generated by taking the data from the W3 Schools Stats and figures were forecast using Excel
And this is valid how?
CC.
TaijiQuan (Huang, 5 loosenings)
If the Linux and Microsoft fanboys want to join me in the Asbestos Lounge, the popcorn and beer are on me.
Web2.0: I love when people Flickr my cuil and digg my boingboing until my google is reddit and I start to yahoo
|...Jobs' recent discussion of Safari on Windows is an attempt to create a duopoly of browsers (IE and Safari), with Firefox and the rest on the outside looking in. ...|
I aint going to buy an Apple Machine just to run Safari. Job's reminds me of a used (i)phone salesman.
Free has a price all its own.
Shhhh... be werry werry quiet... im hunting bwowsers
"In America, first you get the sugar, then you get the power, then you get the women..." -H. Simpson
Apple (Read Jobs and handlers) left out lynx, Opera, FF, tinybrowser, etc out of the presentation because the end result would have looked much more visually confusing that they wanted, IMO.
TFS/TFA make a critical logical error. They state that nothing Jobs does in these presentations is accidental, because we all know how meticulously planned they are. Therefore, if nothing is accidental, then the omission must be a sign of Apple's malevolence toward open source. QED!
Bullshit. The graph doesn't necessarily 'betray the way Apple looks at the world', it betrays they way apple wants the shareholders, newspapermen and fans to look at the world. Their ongoing conceit (diff than deceit) has always (From the late 90's on) been, we are competing against this giant monopoly, here we are, the valiant underdogs. True or not, this is the image (RDF) that has been provided. Apple's recent success may cause people to forget this, to assume that the marketing message is different now. An assumtpion like that would have to come butressed with facts, not shoddy logic.
Does this mean that Apples wants to make nie with open source, or acknowledge the contributions of open source, etc? Of course not. But that doesn't mean that a graph is really a coded browser battle plan to get rid of FF. Apple would be perfectly happy competing for a plurality in browser market share, especially if it meant that users would/could be intimately familiar w/ the iphone interface out of the gate.
Using BSD as the basis for OSX basically gave FOSS credibility in the consumer market.
It's like a decade of free positive publicity.
Mozilla can take the competition. If it can't it shouldn't be in the game.
Are they honestly crying in public because a competitor wants to... compete with them?
Firefox has managed to get a 25% marketshare against Microsoft, on their own OS. Hell, I'm typing this from Firefox on a Mac right now, because I like the addons. If Safari is trying to "edge out" Firefox, they just need to make sure Firefox is a significantly better browser. If it's not, well, you can hardly blame Apple for making a better product.
Anybody who think Jobs is aiming for Firefox users is just paranoid. Clearly Apple has the ability to advertise, and to push (as a download option with iTunes) Safari, more than Mozilla can with Firefox. But there are plenty of IE users to go around, and when compared side by side with IE, Safari will win out. However, no users of Firefox are going to switch. At worst, Firefox's growth might be slowed, but the people who switch from IE to Safari weren't going to try an open source browser anyway. We're talking about people who think that little blue E on their desktop is "the web".
From W3C Schools, which we all know is a high-traffic mainstream web site like Yahoo or MSN.
Yes, all those people switching to IE7 are really starting to make a dent on IE6.
FF is a fine browser and no one denies its market share is growing. There's no need for this type of stupid arm-flapping.
Web2.0: I love when people Flickr my cuil and digg my boingboing until my google is reddit and I start to yahoo
Dear Mozilla Personnel,
I hate to inform you of this, but you are in the capital marketplace, not the communist bloc. Around here, the best (price/features/etc) product wins. Why would you worry about an Apple presentation that fails to mention you? Maybe you should spend your time doing some other things, like... hmmm... maybe....
1. Reducing the memory footprint
2. Speeding up page rendering (#1 reason I don't use FF). For me speed is king, then memory, then UI, then at the bottom of the list "plugins" and "openness".
No matter how subtle the wizard, a knife between the shoulder blades will cramp his style. -- Steven Brust
Apple is gunning for open source software...and he bases this on a pie chart?
Apple's main target by releasing Safari on Windows is Internet Explorer; they want to basically get newbies who have tried iTunes or have iPods and liked it, and might be willing to try other Apple stuff. They aren't going after Firefox users, so a comparison of Safari v IE v Firefox makes no sense. Hell, why not include Opera as well, and OmniWeb, and Lynx! It'll be one confusing motherfucker of a pie chart, but by god Norwegians, both the people using OmniWeb and text-mode fetishists need representation too!
To me, this smacks of "Yoo hoo! Over here! Firefox still exists! Yes! Wooooo! Give us publicity too!". And he's somehow extrapolated a simple omission from a pie chart into a hatred of open source software in general. Very nice.
(Not that I think Safari for Windows is there yet, it's nice but not wonderful. I still use Firefox if I'm use Windows, but prefer Safari under OSX.)
By summer it was all gone...now shesmovedon. --
I don't think Apple's interested in the browser market as it exists, I think they are interested in having cross-platform "client" to run a new generation of web-based content that they will release over the next few years- things like a Safari-based Word Processor, or perhaps photo editor- a remote connection client so you can always get to your Mac. I think Apple wants / need certain features to make this work, and it's easier all around if they use their browser rather than IE or FF. Watch Safari turn into a client for Safari apps, not a new entrant into the browser war. They want it cross-platform so PC users will also be able to take advantage of it, possibly selling more Macs in the process.
That's IE6. If you take the same data and plot it, you'll see that Firefox will overtake the total share of _all_ IE versions sometime december 2008. There's a clear linear trend.
Safari rigorously follows the standards, helping keep the web open for all standards-based browsers. Mozilla should be thanking them.
Lies about crimes
IMHO, this is ridiculous! Safari gets released for Windows, and the Mozilla team immediately has an outcry against it?
... but that won't directly add to Apple's bottom line. They aren't likely to make anything SELLING Safari for Windows either - so it's more or less going to remain a freebie you can opt to use or not use, as you see fit.
The more competition, the better, I say! May the best man win, and all that. I didn't realize Firefox was being strictly worked on as a project with a goal of defeating IE, and no other players were ever supposed to "interfere" with that mission!?
This isn't even a scenario that's real comparable to iTunes - despite that getting thrown around as a comparison. With iTunes, Apple was releasing it as a vehicle to sell music on their store. In that regard, the whole thing was a commercial venture - and it simply made sense to allow the vast number of Windows users a "front end" to be able to purchase Apple's music, instead of keeping it just for the 5-7% of the marketplace that uses Macs.
With Safari, on the other hand, it may become useful or required as a development tool aiding in building apps for the iPhone
I take it as more of a focus on competition, but YMMV. There are lots of browsers, and while I do wish that Safari would get kicked to the curb, how exactly is Apple supposed to work with a project that reacts to a presentation in such a manner? My opinion is that they would like to peel away some Windows/IE users, rather than peel away FF users. What's wrong with that? They sell hardware.
I use FireFox on my MacBook. I wish it were a bit more stable at times. I like WebKit. Opera was nice, but not always usable on various sites. I hear OmniWeb is nice. With FF market share increasing every day, why are they complaining about Apple?
The design considerations for the iPhone specify:
"iPhone User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; U; CPU like Mac OS X; en) AppleWebKit/420+ (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/3.0 Mobile/1A538a Safari/419.3"
I thought OSS was primarily interested in open standards and interoperability with OS applications? An open playing field, rather than market share...
Actually, I think Safari was a bad decision for Apple but a good decision for everybody else. The easy solution for Apple would have been to put Gecko inside a Cocoa app, which would have given them much more compatibility with Web 2.0 sites. By struggling to establish a third standard, they are actually helping everybody else. And if they manage to establish Safari as the #2 browser on the web, all the better: FOSS will simply take the Safari rendering engine (which is open source) and wrap it in a Gtk+ UI.
I'm really struggling with this one. Why would they put an article like this on the front page? You're pitting two of the Absolute Goods against each other, and I'm really not equipped to handle the sort of critical thinking it requires. I'm not sure what to think here, could you help me along? Next thing you'll tell me is that Google has some employees that run Windows!
All fucktarded communist open-sores loving fucktards should go earn themselves a darwin award by finding a razor, running a hot bath, and slitting their fucking wrists.
Technically that wouldn't be a Darwin Award, as they hadn't done anything particularly stupid to get themselves killed, they'd explicitly set out to kill themselves.
(Sorry.)
(No, really... sorry.)
By summer it was all gone...now shesmovedon. --
Considering the slide Firefox has been in in my personal satisfaction index, I find myself not giving a damn that they're afraid of a little competition.
I use OSS because I like the way it works. If it doesn't work well enough, I use something else. Firefox isn't going to stay my browser of choice if there is something out there that does the job better.
Now I'm not really fond of Safari, but if it runs fast, loads fast, doesn't hog system memory, I'm going to start using it. End of fricking story.
ad logicam Claiming a proposition is false because it was presented as the conclusion of a fallacious argument.
It wants its bounce message back. Most spam these days comes from faked, and sometimes legitimate, email addresses, so you're basically bouncing the spam back to an innocent person and possibly spamming them if the original message is included.
Apple says: "Being a good open source citizen, Apple shares its enhancements with the open source community",
which should read: "As required by license, Apple publishes its open source enhancements".
The only "firefox killer" would likely be a Open source Webkit/Webcore based browser that is lighter and faster than firefox. This "safire" browser could also be a likely Safari killer.
Honestly, Firefox is supported by the geek movement towards superior and sometimes, open source solutions. Geeks are geeks before they are Apple fanboys in most cases, so I see them supporting their geek roots over brand loyalty. I would content that Apple users are much more prone to installing and running Firefox than a Windows user is. I do not have the numbers, or if anyone does, but I bet the % of Apple users running FF is higher than the % of Windows users running it.
Geeks spawned the Firefox movement and they will support it as long as it is the best.
Invexi - a Phoenix, AZ based web design and web development company.
With the options of Opera, FF, Safari all out there on various platforms, that's a good thing. There for a while it was shaping up to be a one horse race. So my response is suck it up and produce the better browser that people will want to use.
"The problem with socialism is eventually you run out of other people's money" - Thatcher.
Right now that browser is IE, and when people start the internet, they run IE. And everyone is happy because it gives the server control over the client, which is dangerous only if the client is allowed to go wherever he or she wishes. If Safari can achieve the level of sophistication of IE, then there is a choice of front end, and a cross platform choice at that. Not in the MS sense, where it can run on MS Windows XP and MS Windows XP SP2, but across platforms that implement webkit.
In the front end field, I don't think that any mozilla project is even a contender. Most businesses, at least in the US, mandate IE. The browser market is an MS monopoly, with personal use of other browsers. And in that monopoly, MS cut Apple out by not developing IE for Apple products. Mozilla did not fill the need, as there are still web sites that I could get to work with IE on Mac, but never could with any Mozilla product. Therefore, Apple came in and at least partially filled the void.
Now, what is going to happen if Apple can get front end developers to write towards a broader spec? Well, perhaps Mozilla can be in the running for a competitive front end browser, something it cannot, as far as I am concerned, now do with everything written with an eye towards IE.
"She's a scientist and a lesbian. She's not going to let it slide." Orphan Black
I mean what's good for the goose, etc etc.
If you are using one right now (not likely, I know), I urge you NOT to click on this link
-- Boycott Shell
The headline makes out like Mozilla's whining, but the actual quotes from John Lilly are more about an analysis of Apple's corporate outlook than, as the reporter puts it, "sour grapes."
(Remember Amiga? Commodore?
Amiga didn't disappear because it was the #3. It disappeared because the Commodore exec was so stupid that he didn't think publicity was necessary with such a great product. In the end, Amiga disappeared into oblivion and Commodore went bankrupt.
It is still a reason for celebrations. We should have fireworks on that day. IE6 has tormented web authors far too long.
Most companies hender the more productive uses of their own or other's products so they can make money.
I suspect that Steve Jobs and his cult-like followers do it so they can feel superior.
This is why there is no OSX for normal PC hardware CD for sale.
It is not because Apple couldn't maintain their high quality with out controlling all the hardware. Afterall, Apple could sell OSX and offer support only for the most common two ECS and ASUS motherboards (you gotta have two so that some manufacturer doesn't rob you or your customers), the most common ATI and NVidia video card, and only Apple branded periphials. They would make money. They could outsource the support of those lowly annoying heterosexual lower class trailer park living PC users to an Indian company which would be paid to tell the troublesome cases "you have to buy a real Mac", and guess what, they would make money. OSX is that much better than windows.
It won't happen because Jobs and his followers are actually quite happy with a key feature of the present day computing industry, and would not dare change it: there is an almost feudalism like difference in the quality of "computing experience" between the top and bottom levels of user. The bottom level thinks popups are normal and computers naturally age over time and get slower and slower. The top level, regardless of whether they spend a lot time keeping their windows clean, a lot of time learning linux, or a lot of money on OSX computers, gets stuff done.
A key part of Jobs' self image and that of his followers is that they are in the top level of productivity because of an inate ability to identify Apple as the choice by appreciating it's design. Just as French nobles believed until the day their heads rolled off the guillotine that only the noble born could appreciate fine wine and everyone else should have beer, Appleists would feel threatened by the offensively democratic nature of CD that allowed anyone to have a nice computer for $30.
The truth is, Apple users are Apple users by accidents of marketing and inclination. If the US were under some great threat and had to expend a big national WWII style effort, and could no longer afford the lost productivity, a central authority could just mandate OSX or _maybe_ Ubuntu for everybody and the wife-beater wearing, trailer park living computer users would be just as productive as the turtleneck wearing, condo living computer users. That's scare to Jobs though.
In reality, I think Dell selling Ubuntu could be sinking Jobs chance of ever mattering to history. I used one of those computers over the weekend and it's not OSX, but works well enough and you dkn't need to get on usenet to figure out how to start the browser. I have a feeling that it will take off slowly but steadily and the computing world will never look back.
What a fool believes, he sees, no wise man has the power to reason away.
I've read this a couple of times, and I wonder how much the Apple hype machine is pushing it. It's great publicity; the CEO of Mozilla Corporation[1] publicly implying that FireFox can't compete with Safari. After that, it doesn't matter which browser is actually better to the average user; FireFox sounds like it isn't up to snuff.
[1] The company that makes millions of dollars a year, that we're supposed to feel sorry for.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
I understand the importance of standards in designing a web page. I have seen the ugliness of trying to render a page built for IE in Safari. I don't see the direct correlation of revenue produce by distributing a web browser and my usage of it. The things are given away for free. What is all the static about Apple releasing Safari for Windows. It just another browser!. The diversity of web browser market is necessary to promote open standards. I am generally happy about Apple releasing Safari for Windows for two reasons. First, a Safari version for Windows means I don't have to pay for Leopard to get the latest version. More importantly, Windows Safari will increase the userbase of Safari consequently making Safari harder to ignore when designing a webpage.
You don't have to be smart to use a Mac, you just have to be smart enough to buy one
Safari for Windows also introduces Windows users to how Macs render fonts, rather than using Windows' font rendering engine. This, of course, could be good or bad. For me the blurred edges are a little annoying. I expect fonts to appear in Windows apps in a certain way, just as I have display expectations for when using apps on the Mac. But putting a Mac font rendering engine on Windows?...bleh.
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Okay nobody seems to have picked up on the obvious flaw with this statistic - the w3school's site (from which the data on which this prediction was based) is a (poor imho) web developer's resource. Naturally with an audience that has an intrinsic interest in browsers and standards Firefox (and other alternative browsers) it will show up in statistics generated disproportionately to it's actual usage in the general public, it also explains the adoption rate of IE7 being very high. These statistics are useless and that prediction is completely invalid outside of that specific site.
There's mischief and malarkies but no queers or yids or darkies within this bastard's carnival, this vicious cabaret.
If the only way that Mozilla can survive is for Apple (and whoever else wants to toss their hat in the ring) to refrain from building a browser, then Mozilla doesn't deserve to survive.
But the good news is, Mozilla can survive, and it will, if it is good enough to compete against Safari and IE and Opera (and whoever else wants to toss their hat into the ring.) And presently, it is that good. I don't foresee that changing anytime soon. And if and when it does, I'll gladly adopt whatever the best browser is on that day, just as I've ditched Netscape 1.x through 4.7, IE 3 through 6, and all the rest I've tried over the years. Right now I like Firefox.
You see? You see? Your stupid minds! Stupid! Stupid!
Safari lost bigtime on OS X because Apple refused to castrate ANY advertising, annoying or otherwise. There is a powerful incentive for business to avoid Safari on any platform, for the same reason. Frankly, advertising is a distraction that has no more place in a corporate browser than it does in a corporate payroll package.
Standardizing on Firefox is an easy decision to make.
``Tension, apprehension & dissension have begun!'' - Duffy Wyg&, in Alfred Bester's _The Demolished Man_
Which is exactly what Abraxor says. As IE7 eats up the market share of IE6, it looks like there will come a point, for a few months, where each is smaller than FF, though their combined share will obviously be greater. As IE7 continues to take users from IE6, it will then exceed the market share of FF.
Note to ACs: I usually delete AC replies without reading them. If you want to talk to me, log in.
Yes, but it's still a milestone...
And the numbers do indicate that the percentage of IE users is gradually going down, across the board, while FF rises even faster.
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
Can we please kill this meme? As I wrote the other day: "There are only two competitors in the web browser market: Internet Explorer and standards-compliant browsers. From a web development standpoint, it doesn't matter which of the many standards-compliant browsers is being used: that's why there are standards. So this talk about Safari "stealing" from Firefox is bullshit. It doesn't make any difference."
That's it. There's no story. Safari on Windows doesn't hurt anyone except maybe Microsoft. Just because Jobs didn't take time out of his keynote to stroke the collective Firefox ego does not mean Apple is "hunting" Mozilla.
The exec also highlighted Mozilla's attitude about market share: "We've never ever at Mozilla said that we care about Firefox market share at the expense of our more important goal: to keep the web open and a public resource," he said.
The subtext being that Apple somehow is contrary to this. As if releasing a browser (based on an open source rendering engine) which actually has better adherence to standards than Mozilla browsers is going to make the web less open and public. Sorry folks, but that is a dead end.
Don't become a regular here -- you will become retarded.
If Apple/MS does something nasty, the community will cry foul and move to an alternative, or make one themselves.
This is not quite true. "The Community" is all web users, the bulk of which are IE users. If MS does something nasty, the bulk of the community will not notice, and will not care. A small, vocal group will call foul, but their cries will largely fall on deaf ears. Website designers design for the de facto standards (which means IE), not necessarily the official standards. The only way this will change is if IE tanks in popularity.
The best way to accomplish this is to make a browser that is grossly superior to IE. Tabbed browsing used to be the deciding factor. Perhaps security is the Next Big Thing(TM), or integrated VOIP, or group browsing (see what sites your friends are surfing). Whatever it's going to be, open source has to lead the way if you're wanting to sway the community towards true standards compliance.
When our name is on the back of your car, we're behind you all the way!
Apple gunning for the OSS browser market is a great thing. Mozilla spent years going nowhere before the Firefox developers finally made something sane out of it. Now the Firefox developers are busy playing with the interface, piling on features, and rambling about web standards while the browser is still not able to pass Acid2.
What Apple brings to the table is competition. Opera gave up on Windows and is busy in the embedded market. Konqueror is great, going nowhere in the Windows world. IE 7 showed the world that the IE team still have their heads up their butts, so without another great browser on Windows there's no serious competition for the Firefox team, and thus nothing to keep them from going the way of Mozilla. Now that Firefox actually has a decent browser with a big name behind it to compete with, maybe we'll see Firefox development focus on fixing bugs quickly, becoming Acid2 compliant, etc.
This "issue" is so overblown.
I think Lilly was definitely reading WAAAAAY to much into the simplified graph. What Steve was really saying is that hey hoped to eventually get something closer to 15% share.
Why is that important? Because it will force the retarded web developers to stop coding purely to IE. As Firefox has reached 10-15% share, web designers now test more regularly on the browser. Folks start using few ActiveX controls as a way to design web pages. That's good for everyone.
What would have been more confusing is if Steve would have put 3 sections up there. Folks would be arguing whether the Firefox piece was bigger or smaller than the Safari piece. Basically, no matter what Steve did, he was going to get grief, so he went with the simpler chart!
The browsers will be successful on their own merits. It's only taken 3 major releases for Firefox to finally support native Mac control. Safari is beta and has lots of bugs (many related to porting), so we'll have to see how that settles as well. The real loser will ultimately be IE, which is fine by me. IE 6 and 7 offer up the absolute worst user experience when browsing to pages that are CSS/HTML compliant, but not written to IE6 specifically.
"National Security is the chief cause of national insecurity." - Celine's First Law
The real reason that Apple released Safari for Windows isn't to compete with IE. It's to compete with Windows Mobile.
~ a low user id is no indication I have a clue what I'm talking about.
I say bring it on and let it continue.
Doesnt matter because IE6 and IE7 are very different - webpages have to render correct in IE6, FF and IE7. Big win for standards.
I use Firefox, and I say WTF?
As long as Apple is sticking to web standards as well as or better than Firefox, and are not trying to pull a Microsoft in that regard, I don't care if Apple's goal is to have 100% of the browser market. WHO CARES? It's a goal, it's not a truth. Everyone using Firefox now can continue using Firefox.
BTW, as far as I know, Safari was the first browser to render the Acid 2 test accurately, the first one to have an official release that could render it accurately, over a year before Firefox 3 nightlies came out passing it. It seems they are doing an admirable job along with KDE on this.
Ironically, the word ironically is often used incorrectly.
Well, as a web designer, I can tell you the biggest hassle of trying to design websites, is that I have to have a Windows box (or virtualization) to test my websites for IE. I think the real reasons Apple released Safari for Windows, is to give the possible iPhone developers a tool to test any Web 2.0 Apps that they might want to develop.
Why does it always have to be a conspiracy with some people?
The real Sig captains the Northwestern. This one captains
Why wasn't Firefox split between versions in that graph?
I actually did lol. high-five!
I'm going to go out on a limb here, and suggest the wild-ass hypothesis that the second pie chart was created that way for the solitary purpose of getting a bajillion uber-geeks to buzz, buzz, buzz about Safari on Windows. But that's just me.
The "cue the foo posts in 3, 2, 1..." posts will commence with no subsequent foo posts in 3, 2, 1...
Their stats are taken from www.w3schools.com which always seems to have an uncommonly high percentage of FF visitors.
google image search for 'safari' now turns up pictures of a stupid browser.
Weren't people 5 years ago complaining there was NO competition to IE? Hypocrites.
As if Steve Jobs wouldn't go after OSS in a HEARTBEAT if he saw the chance to become the dominant player with his proprietary software.
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
With this video. http://www.firefoxflicks.com/flick/index.php?id=19 542&c=false
Hey, this is Apple. They love to be seen as 'hip', but they are really sharply focused on the bottom line. If they can't find a way to make a profit on Safari for Windows, they'll drop it like a red hot rock.
There will either be a strong tie in to some commercial Apple service, or there will be no future for Safari on Windows.
This is no different than many other Apple offerings. See what happened with iTunes, Newton, and others. If the profit is there, they will push it. If not, they will abandon you and move on.
Sorry, Apple Fans, but the truth is Apple is a company, not a charity.
Everybody knows 3 people with my name.
I suspect Steve knew you'd blow your trumpet and sound the alarm about this, and you know what? That's fine. The pie chart in the keynote showed Safari eclipsing all browsers except for IE because, to be perfectly frank, most users of IE aren't trained enough or don't care enough to switch browsers, period. Lest you forget: It is pre-installed. Downloadable installs are the realm of "switchers" ... away from IE and to something else. Apple would be daft to frame it any other way. The question is, John Lilly, are you going to stand around and whine, then be plowed under by a rival? Or are you going to keep building a better browser?
Look at what the Zarus, and now Nokia 8800 did.
All you really need is a Java VM, (or Python) with some standard libraries, and you can use the apps already developed that are out there. Apple just needs to get the base libraries out there, and the VM in there.
It's nice to start your product with a library of several hundred applications, with more commercial ones available soon. (weeks at most.)Remember, ease of porting is the goal.
Safari on Windows is not necessary. May not even be enough by itself.
Everybody knows 3 people with my name.
What startles me more is the paranoia involved in this statement. Apple is "hunting" them because they didn't show up in a slide in a Powerpoint (or more likely Keynote) presentation?
And this is the first conclusion you jump to? It's impossible that the graph is laid out that way because Apple wanted to compare Safari to IE, and only to IE?
Comment of the year
The nonprofit corporation, wholly owned by the Mozilla Foundation, to be precise.
Ha! FF overtook IE 6 a long time ago according to this site. http://virtuawin.sourceforge.net/website_stats.php
Oh, I should mention this site is for aa Windows power user app. But, hey, you gotta admit seeing FF at ~60% does give a nice warm 'n fuzzy, no?
SD
Duopoly? Really, this is nonsense.
If Firefox is worried perhaps they should actually implement more than 10 features into the Preferences of the browser. Perhaps try to AT LEAST match IE's flexibility in defining security zones and restricting sites, as well as other things.
Safari suffers from the same. Both claim to be far more secure browsers yet somehow they have almost no functionality in the Preferences that goes beyond the first tab in IE's Internet Options.
I mean, sure, I love having "Search when I start typing" instead of being able to turn off every single nuance of browser behavior.
Throw Maxthon into the mix and Firefox is facing a vertical incline.
I think Lilly was definitely reading WAAAAAY to much into the simplified graph.
I don't agree.
The chart bothered me as well. Either Jobs recovered damn well from putting the wrong chart up, or he really did mean that he was targeting a world where there were only two browsers.
If he was trying to avoid confusing people, he would have left Firefox out of the first chart as well.
I watched the keynote vid before and never noticed that little slight. I had to go back and watch that section again just to prove it. Very observant and interesting, wish I had mod points for you because I'd rather see FF, Opera, and others remain while Safari takes share from IE. FWIW, I'm a Macbook Pro and use FF because Safari lags in terms of dev tool add-ons. It's not that Safari is a bad browser, I just think FF is superior for web development.
Good people do not need laws to tell them to act responsibly, while bad people will find a way around the laws-Plato
I know MS Office's not even an actual part of Windows; but since many Users seem to regard it as such, I allowed myself to include it.
That is indeed an interesting stat, thanks for posting that. I think a reasonable conclusion we can draw here is that Windows power users are overwhelmingly more likely to chuck IE and use Firefox.
I'm a Mac and Linux (KDE) user and I chucked Safari on Mac and Konqueror on KDE and use Firefox instead, and both of those are better than IE in most respects, so I know where those Windows users are coming from.
Why did I chuck Safari? It doesn't (in my experience) render quite as well as Firefox, but it's mostly about control. Through a few choice plug-ins like Noscript, plus FF's better control of cookies, my security control is much more fine-grained than it is in Safari. And the amount of nice plug-ins for FF seems to soundly best Safari, too.
Why did I chuck Konqueror? I like it in a lot of ways: it's very fast, and it has the most fine-grained out of the box security controls I've seen on any browser. However, I went with FF because its rendering is now quite a bit better than Konqueror's, and through the use of plug-ins I can get control over security that's almost as fine-grained as that of Konqueror, and more convenient (I can't overstate how good Noscript is). Add to that the huge amount of plug-ins available for FF and it turned even this KDE user into a Firefox user in KDE.
And if I weren't already settled on FF as my all-platform browser, the Google Browser Sync plug-in that I just discovered for FF would have been the tipping point. I can sync everything - browsing history, bookmarks, cookies, the lot - between my MacBook Pro, my Linus desktop, and the one Windows system we have in our house (I don't use it much, it's mostly my wife's Yahoo Messenger machine, but once in a while). FF is a good browser, and the great array of great plug-ins for it make it IMO the best browser available.
Since someone will probably jump in here and mention Opera, I'll address that, too. I try Opera about once a year just to see what's new, but since it's inception, the UI of Opera has just bugged me. That doesn't mean there's anything wrong with Opera - it's a fine browser, and it's the fastest one I've ever used, easily - but UI is a matter of taste and Opera just doesn't suit my taste and likely never will. But if it works for others, cool. I encourage its use if it's what works for you.
Well, I just put a simple forecast in a graphing tool and the trend seems to be good for us (if everything progresses in the steps we are going now, no funky marketing from Microsoft or kick-ass functionality from the Apple/Mozilla camps).
Graphed all of IE as well as separate IE's
Combined Mozilla + Firefox (from the W3 Schools data)
Well, Netscape has been dead for a while
Opera will continue as is (small raise)
Safari will slowly progress (bigger raise)
All IE's combined will keep above Firefox until Q4 2008 into Q1 2009 when IE6 finally will die and IE7 and Firefox/Mozilla will have about 50/50 share of the remaining market (less than 5% forecast to go into Opera/Safari)
IE6 will be overtaken by Firefox/Mozilla within a few months (Q4 2007) maybe even earlier and IE5 will die at the same moment (hurray).
Of course there's lies, damn lies and statistics and I didn't count in any of the future updates to either product line.
Custom electronics and digital signage for your business: www.evcircuits.com
Sorry, but they showed us two charts, representing "before" and "after", and the "before" chart contained Firefox and Opera, and the "after" chart did not. There's only one way to interpret that.
Yup, as a joke. Watch it again, and listen to the people laughing in the audience.
If you insist on taking everything in the Keynote at face value, though, good luck deciding which version of Leopard to buy--Basic, Premium, Business, Enterprise, or Ultimate!
Build a man a fire, he's warm for one night. Set him on fire, and he's warm for the rest of his life.
WebKit is not OSS now? Hm...
Anyway - how is Safari-the-WebKit-engine worse than Firefox-the-Gecko-engine? If anything I'd like to see more standards compatible browsers and then there's a chance we can defeat evil MSIE. Gecko-is-the-standard did not play well last time when Netscape gone under and Microsoft won the first browser war, right?
The Mac userbase by definition is mostly comprised of people who are in no way shape or form computer literate. So what on earth makes you think the majority of Mac users are going to Mozilla.org to download and install Firefox on their own instead of using the built in Safari web browser?
Doesn't sound like it makes sense to you either when you say it to yourself does it?
Mac OS X and Windows XP working side by side to fight back the night.
I agree!
Note to ACs: I usually delete AC replies without reading them. If you want to talk to me, log in.
Apple doesn't really stand to gain by edging Firefox out of the market. It's also been suggested a few times that Safari for Windows makes iPhone development more accessible, which is true, but even that assertion misses the big picture:
By releasing Safari for Windows, Apple is investing in Safari's relevance. The smart Windows users have it easy: run FF most of the time, until you come across a really dumb or poorly-authored website, then just use IE when you really need to load that page. Mac users don't really have that option. If it doesn't render properly in Camino/Firefox, try it in Safari - if that doesn't work, maybe try OmniWeb, but chances are you just aren't gonna view that site on a Mac.
Apple doesn't make money from Safari. It was developed for OS X because its then-default browser, IE, sucked. And they based Safari on KHTML, an open-source engine totally separate from Mozilla's. This is great stuff! Two separate OSS teams coding for standards-compliant browsing!
But back to my original point about relevance: I still have the Tiger version of Safari, but I mainly use Camino because it seems to generally be a bit zippier, and it works with the new Yahoo! mail UI while Safari doesn't.
--- what??? you heard me right - a major web player like Yahoo! is developing web apps and putting more priority on Gecko than OS X's, and iPhone's, default browser. Sure, Firefox has more marketshare than Safari, but for iPhone users who can't change their browser, and for OS X users who are not inclined to change their browser, this is a huge problem that undermines the value of Apple's products.
Apple's strategy: push Safari out to everybody who might be downloading iTunes. Include it on CD with every iPod sold. Make it install on Windows by default unless the user unchecks a box. Suddenly, Safari is in the hands of zillions of Windows users, and companies like Yahoo! take notice: "We'd better make our apps work with Safari!"
Mozilla should not feel threatened, excepting that Firefox will now have to compete on its merits, instead of just being "the alternative browser". Users who have installed Firefox on Windows already know how to choose their own browser, and they won't go to Safari without a reason.
Lilly's comments are ABSOLUTELY sour grapes, because he doesn't want to compete with another free (as in beer) product. When he sayd that the web is owned by people and not companies, he fails to mention that Safari's web rendering component is standards-compliant and open-source.
So, to summarize:
- Apple NEEDS Safari to be recognized as a major browser.
- Safari will likely continue what Firefox has been doing: chipping away at IE's dominance.
- Those who have switched from IE will choose between Safari/Firefox (and KHTML/Gecko) based on product merits. Plus some people will just use Safari because iTunes told them to.
You all keep saying that (and of course getting positively moderated nicely for it) but nowhere on the Safari web site does it say "only for iPhone application developers" and Jobs' own presentation also does not make that distinction, and he CLEARLY states that Safari is intended to be a replacement for Firefox and other third party browsers. So do you have another source to back up the oft-repeated claim that Safari on Windows is only for developers, or are you simply rationalizing yet another aggressive anti-open-source action by Apple?
I'm less worried about having my browser comply with arbitrary and generally anti-MS standards, and far more concerned with having a browser which doesn't crash every fifteen minutes.
Mozilla gets around this by remembering what page you are viewing, but that's a weak substitue for a stable browser.
As for Apple... lol, nice job on Safari. Keep beating the FUD drum about how Apple is so secure and well programmed- when the press starts talking about all the people having their credit card info stolen and the gaping security flaws, and the user complaints and magazine reviews about how buggy and crash prone Safari is on Windows... it's going to knock down that huge house of cards Apple has been building on their so-called great programming.
It not about Safari, IE, and Firefox, it's about KHTML, IE, and Gecko. And 2 of 3 of these engines are open source. The article makes it sound like Apple has some proprietary, closed-source browser, when almost all of it is open source.
And the latest statistics I've seen show Safari at around 1/4 to 1/3 the market share of Firefox. While that's certainly not ideal for Apple, it's not like Safari is insignificant. And while Safari probably constitutes most of the KHTML-based hits on most sites, Konquerer, Nokia's cellphone, and others probably feed some degree of KHTML share as well.
The bottom line is that this article isn't really based on facts, it's just one open source developer ranting about another one.
E pluribus unum
Assuming, of course, that the competition isn't fixed. IE became the dominant browser on Windows by being preinstalled. Safari became the dominant browser on the Mac by being preinstalled.
The final release of Safari on Windows will probably be offered as a bundle with iTunes and QuickTime, and probably offered through Apple Software Update. I've got QuickTime on my Windows box at work for testing purposes. Apple's updater "conveniently" offered to install iTunes when I went to install a security patch. If Apple does this with Safari as well, they've got a good chance of getting the next best thing to pre-installed.
On the plus side, Safari and Firefox are tailored toward different audiences. Safari has always been aimed at the "just make it work" crowd, while Firefox tries to get that crowd and the "trick out my browser" crowd. I suspect Safari could take some of the first audience from Firefox, but it won't be able to tempt many power users from Firefox or Opera
Whether Jobs was grandstanding or not, that slide bothered me too. I filed it mentally as Jobs being Jobs, pretty much, but them my ox isn't being gored by Safari. I don't think it's fair to dismiss Lilly's concerns as "sour grapes", though... Jobs *did* kind of throw down the gauntlet, and it didn't seem to be Microsoft he was challenging.
AOL!
Snowden and Manning are heroes.
Every time I hear Lilly say something about Safari recently, I can't help but genuinely feel the sentiment "Stop complaining like a little bitch." If you're that worried about Apple, stop crying for help and step up to the plate.
Safari doesn't rate even a casual eval.
No flashblock. No ad blocking.
Not.
Worth.
My.
Time.
These are my friends, See how they glisten. See this one shine, how he smiles in the light.
Safari is not a "third standard". First, it's based off of KHTML, and second, it adheres to the W3C standards, just like good browsers should.
Unintentional quirks aside, there are only two standards: The W3C's, and Microsoft's de-facto one. So where's this "third standard"?
What an asshole this Mozilla chief. As if they're aren't raking in enough money from their Google alliance.
I haven't seen the pie chart (got a link? TFA didn't) but for the love of god, IE is #1 and FF is #2! Maybe he should have left out IE too, that would have made the pie chart a nice uniform one color for Safari. :-)
It's rare that you're presented with a knob whose only two positions are Make History and Flee Your Glorious Destiny.
I'm hunting OSS bwowsews...
Many comments seem to imply that Safari is fighting against open source.
Although Apple doesn't necessarily update the source code more often than they release software, people forget that Safari is mostly open-source itself...
it's sort of like a cult
That's like saying Catholicism is sort of like an organized religion, or that Bush Jr. is sort of like a dumbass.
You must be new here. What, you didn't have to hand your girlfriend over for 'debriefing' when you signed up? CowboyNeal said it was pure SOP.
CS majors know the time/space tradeoff, but they never get taught the 3rd, crucial, tradeoff of the set: comprehension!
Don't you mean "hurting"? Couldn't you please fix this?
"the w3school's site (from which the data on which this prediction was based) is a (poor imho) web developer's resource."
I've been using w3school for a while, I've found it pretty useful but could be better. I continue to use it since I haven't seen anything better. Do you know of a better site that does what w3school does?
Honestly, there's no site that I'm aware of that fills the same niche - personally I find the best reference for CSS / HTML questions are their respective specifications on the w3c site. My issue with w3schools, by the way, stems from the fact that often their information is misleading and occasionally even outright wrong; if you're an experienced developer these errors are fairly obvious, however if you're an experienced developer you're not really in the target audience for the site.
There's mischief and malarkies but no queers or yids or darkies within this bastard's carnival, this vicious cabaret.
I don't think Firefox has much to worry about. I can't use Safari at home or at work as Safari has the "No Fonts" bug on all the systems I've even tried to install it on.
:) Oh well. Good luck Apple.
I don't even setup or administer the systems at work so it's not my fault there.
Where's the linux version and why is this on slashdot now?
Comment removed based on user account deletion
It is still a reason for celebrations. We should have fireworks on that day. IE6 has tormented web authors far too long.
I wouldn't celebrate just yet. It seems that only recently many web developers have stopped worrying about IE5/IE5.5, despite it being superceded by IE6 six years ago. Even so, it still seems to have a lingering ~1% share, making it a larger concern than some the other minor players like Opera or Konquerer.
You have failed to grok. Safari for Windows is a Stealth Attack on IE. Get a grip.
Without getting into any browser war stuff, I would just like to say that Penn State U (yes, the one with JoePa and the football team) is migrating from official support of IE to Firefox for it's course management, student management, etc. systems. Whatever it is, the program is called FrontMotion Firefox. IE support is supposed to be officially gone by the end of the year. And yes, the offical OS is MS.
Vote monkeys into Congress. They are cheaper and more trustworthy.
There are Adobe products that were never ported to the Mac, or where the Mac version was of poor quality or lagged in features. Considering that Adobe and Apple have a reasonably good relationship overall, despite these issues, perhaps Adobe might be equally to blame. Should Adobe have contacted Apple at a high level and said, "hey, we need this, can we help speed it up?".
The Amiga is particularly relevant, because we remember how Jobs dealt with that: by completely pretending he'd never heard of the thing. He held endless presentations of "new" things in MacOS which AmigaOS had for years, and of course, he got away with it.
Email from Apple Senior Patent Counsel to WHATWG group:
Dear WHATWG and Mr. Hickson,
Apple Computer, Inc. ("Apple") believes it has intellectual property rights ("IP Rights") relative to WHATWG's Web Applications 1.0 Working Draft, dated March 24, 2005, Section 10.1, entitled "Graphics: The bitmap canvas". At this time, Apple reserves all rights in its IP Rights and makes no representations as to Apple's willingness or unwillingness to license these IP Rights. However, in the event that the Web Applications 1.0 Working Draft, dated March 24, 2005, becomes part of a formalized draft standard at W3C or IETF, for example, Apple is prepared to address the disclosure/licensing rules of such organizations.
Any questions regarding this communication should be directed to:
Director of Patents
Apple Computer, Inc.
1 Infinite Loop, MS 3-PAT
Cupertino, CA 95014-2084
Voice: (408) 974-9453
Fax: (408) 974-5436
E-mail: iplaw at apple.com
Sincerely,
Helene Plotka Workman
Senior Patent Counsel, Apple Computer, Inc.
Take a look and feel free: http://www.PieMenu.com
Geek browser is, Konqueror, Dillo, elinks, etc.
Mozilla is *not* a geek browser. It is the leftover of netscape navigator which was made by a very rich company who was dying.
Mozilla is a very dangerous browser because due to the plugin architecture it makes the web a loophole for running proprietary vm's in the browser. Aim of mozilla is to kill any OSS/geek attempts to create a web browser. Why? Because if you're number 4, you don't matter. And mozilla is most of the time buzy pushing forward new web standards, unstable extensions and plugins, instead of real development.
And imagine a true Geek browser that killed the ads and was used by most people. Doubleclick would bankrupt and google would've lost $3.1 bn in the toilet. Nobody wants that!!
not even apple, to be exact!
This whole freaking discussion is absolutly insane. Apple compared Safari to the browser most other Windows users are using. That doesn't mean they want to destroy Firefox. If anything, it's in Apple's best interest to have Firefox out there, taking away market share from IE, forcing web designers to stay away from Microsoft's proprietary technologies.
In fact, in the comparison chart, Apple lists Firefox as the second-best alternative to Internet Explorer.
I honestly don't understand this weird, paranoid complaint.
Yeah. WebKit, the HTML backend, seems to be pretty stable. Nokia uses it in its phones, and it runs well on Mac OS X. The Windows frontend is 100% new and currently extremely unstable.
Opera ist pretty awsome. If the best browser would win, then we would have more Opera installations than Firefox. So Safari will get users, because of marketing.
Apple is in bed with Google (maps, search, youtube, etc.) and Google is in bed with Mozilla (financial contributions and other non-public contributions).
Unless Google has suddenly become disenchanted with Firefox and Mozilla, which is doubtful as they are big supporters of Microsoft competition... the chart Steve showed was a marketing ploy or a concession to Microsoft to gain some talking points when discussing Office for Mac.
A fool throws a stone into a well and a thousand sages can not remove it.
That is fantastically bad software design (reminiscent of Windows 9x single-user-centric programming) and may explain one of the reasons that Vista initially had so many issue with iTunes. Vista more or less FORCES programs to handle multiple users well.
The thing that astounds me is that anybody could write flagship software for their own POSIX OS with such flaws in it. Does anybody know whether iTunes has the same problem running on OS X? (I presume OS X supports multiple graphical sessions running in at once.) If it does, how the hell did they fsck it up so badly on Windows?
There's no place I could be, since I've found Serenity...
If John Lilley doesn't know at this point that Internet Explorer is not coming along for Web 2.0 then the Mozilla executive has not been paying attention to the technology of the Web and should be fired. It isn't that Apple is gunning for OSS that is bullshit, it's that OSS is all the competition there is. Microsoft is not in this game at all, they are like last year's Miss America when it comes to Web 2.0.
I know there is a myth of Microsoft invincibility and everything but it is a well known fact that Internet Explorer is merely a zombie, it was dead for 5 full years, no development team even. The beta of Safari on Windows is twice as fast as IE, do you think MS can decouple IE Windows from Windows and port it to a phone and get anything like reasonable performance? Can they get that done by 2005?
I am so tired of PC people: "Microsoft Microsoft Microsoft Microsoft Microsoft Microsoft Microsoft Microsoft Microsoft Microsoft Microsoft Microsoft Microsoft Microsoft Microsoft Microsoft Microsoft Microsoft Microsoft Microsoft Microsoft Microsoft Microsoft Microsoft Microsoft Microsoft Microsoft Microsoft Microsoft Microsoft Microsoft Microsoft Microsoft." That is all they fucking know. Everything is somebody trying to cut off somebody else's air supply. Everything is a race to the bottom, a contest to see who can kill themselves slowest and thus be the last man standing. That king of the hill business only works if there is just ONE device, like the PC. Those days are over, huh?
I mean imagine John Lilley's delusion: Steve Jobs, lying awake at night "how can I take some of Mozilla's 50 million dollars per year non-profit budget while damaging the partnership between the Gecko and WebKit development teams and as a bonus make Billg happy?" Riiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiight. Like Apple needs Mozilla's lunch money. C'mon.
Safari and Firefox are the Coke and Pepsi of Web 2.0 (Konqueror is the Dr. Pepper), which for some people is just starting but really we are years into it already. Microsoft is irrelevant because they are so far behind already they cannot catch up. While they were snickering at Firefox and Safari the two open source projects have marshaled pretty much every human being on the planet who can make Web code (DEVELOPERS!) and gave us what we always wanted, two independent open source Web rendering engines that are so standards-compliant that for the most part you can write for one and it just works in the other. You would think Monkey Boy would have thought about Web developers but he looks down on us because we are not real coders like Billg ha ha.
Before the iPhone announcement, the only browser I was ever asked to be specifically compatible with was Explorer. Since the iPhone announcement, executives want to know if my stuff runs on iPhone. That is the end user kick-off for Web 2.0 in the same way that Firefox v1 was the kick-off for developers.
Another interesting future end user Web 2.0 event will be the first hit Web app that doesn't run in Explorer (either a new app or a Flickr 2.0 or similar) and people will finally have a reason to download Firefox, same as we all downloaded Netscape 3 to see rollovers. Similarly, someone may create a Web 2.0 version of the rollover, some interface thing that is a must-have and every site owner wants but doesn't run in IE.
Within 5 years, phones will make up more than half the Web. The personal computer is going to recede back into the den and the office and the studio from where it came. If Explorer stays at 75% of the PC it will still be a minority browser. It has way, way, way too many broken and non-standard features to survive in that position. The Web is just going to look more and more broken in there as time goes on and Web developers stop working around all the bugs.
Which is exactly what Abraxor says.
But which is exactly what the OP didn't say ("Firefox will overtake IE in August.")Lars T.
To the guy who modded me down from perfect to terrible Karma - Apple haters still suck
Mods, when you unfairly mod somebody with "Troll" you are likely to get punished by the meta moderators. This comment may not be particularly insightful, but it's clearly not a troll, and it's a damn sight more interesting than the lame "top of the day" site that its parent post linked. If you disagree, then post a comment, don't mod Troll unless its a Troll.
Comments like Lily's are ostensibly about megacompanies dominating over smaller ones and hurting the end-user in the process.
However, those comments are really just complaints that end-users aren't making the "correct" choice.
Let's say Steve Jobs ends up correct in his predictions and Safari picks up a healthy chunk of the userbase.
So what?
People still have a choice in what they use, just as they do now.
I use Safari on my Mac and Firefox on Windows because they suit my needs overall. I am still giving Safari on Windows a fair shot and have been trying to use it for past week or so to gauge whether it's going to be better for me in the long run.
Those are my choices...not Jobs' or Lily's or anyone else.
Working in IT, however, I do have some influence and credibility over what endusers I support will use or have access to on their machines. Thus, I usually throw Firefox on any new set-up, but most people still go looking "the Internets, that E thing" whenever they want t browse.
That's fine with me. Their choices are a product of what they need, are used to, and about which they are educated.