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Mozilla Exec Claims Apple is Hunting OSS Browsers

Posted by Zonk on from the firefox-has-always-been-the-enemy dept.

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.

14 of 539 comments (clear)

  1. Pie Chart is all about marketing by MSTCrow5429 · · Score: 3, Interesting

    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.

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    1. Re:Pie Chart is all about marketing by suv4x4 · · Score: 4, Interesting

      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.

      Apple's marketing was always extreme, and that is their style for as long as Jobs is on top.

      This achieves few things:

      - The core of Mac users become even more devoted to the Apple brand (it's sort of like a cult, it doesn't matter sometimes Jobs says ridiculous things).

      - The rest of the world sees Apple as arrogant, sometimes foolish, but always and always interesting nonetheless.

      - Which on the other hand makes Apple a great news material, and gains it a huge media coverage.

      So the bottomline: they're doing what they have to, to survive. The "reality distortion field" of Jobs isn't a myth - it's very real, and the guy's doing it to get the exact effects he gets.

      Apple always tries to create its own bubble where it competes with mythical collective enemies such as "The PC", "Microsoft", "The rest of the Phones", "The rest of the browsers". To support this bubble, you need the extreme kind of marketing Jobs does, otherwise it falls a apart and Apple will have to compete in the real market like any other company.

      Jobs uses bubbles in his own company as well. Many people know that he would separate his employees in "buubles" and let them "fight" each other (in their work) to full exhaustion (such was the case with Apple II and Lisa teams). The other team is the enemy, and you gotta do everything humanly possible to support your own bubble.

  2. Imminent Death of FireFox Predicted. JPGs at 11. by srmalloy · · Score: 3, Interesting

    Meanwhile, Abraxor has taken available data and projected that Firefox will overtake IE in August...

  3. Re:Apple on Windows by Aqua+OS+X · · Score: 2, Interesting

    When does iTunes do that?

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  4. Re:Um... what? by Bobartig · · Score: 2, Interesting

    At the very best, Apple is introducing what is *potentially* a superior browser on Windows. It's entirely premature to claim that Windows Safari is any good yet. Safari 3 for Mac will probably win me back from Firefox, but I think Safari has an uphill battle, what with foisting a lot of Mac-like UI constructs on PC users.

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  5. Re:Um... what? by MightyMartian · · Score: 2, Interesting

    It seems to me that it is Safari that has the uphill battle, not Firefox. I can think of absolutely no reason to move to Safari.

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  6. Re:Nothing to Worry About... by jsdcnet · · Score: 2, Interesting

    The real value of Safari on Windows is not as a web browser, but as an IDE for the iPhone.

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    no longer working for cnet
  7. Wake Up and Smell the Capitalism by stephenmowry · · Score: 2, Interesting

    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".

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  8. Competition by simpl3x · · Score: 2, Interesting

    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...

  9. Re:Um... what? by TheRaven64 · · Score: 3, Interesting

    Exactly. Safari 3 on Mac is the nicest browser I've used for a long time. Safari 3 on Windows seems to be making all of the UI mistakes that FireFox does on Mac. On the plus side, now WebKit works on Windows (thanks to Adobe), it's possible for someone other than Apple to make a WebKit-based browser that does conform to the Windows UI guidelines, such as they are.

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  10. Re:Apple on Windows by pla · · Score: 2, Interesting

    Why exactly would you want to have two copies of itunes open at the same time?

    Because modern computers can easily handle multiple users, perhaps? Because I can set up one decent machine running Win2k3 and several cheap-ass XP boxes RD'ing into the decent one (I would ahave said "one decent Linux box and several diskless remote X servers, but considering iTunes' fabulous Linux support...)? Because I just want to, and don't really need a better reason?


    So you can listen to two songs simultaneously?

    And if I want to do exactly that, a program should prevent me from doing so because?


    Seriously dude, of all the things to complain about that's a really bad example.

    No, actually, it pretty much hits the nail on the head regarding why I will never own a Mac until Steverino departs the scene... In his world, you do things his way, or no way at all. Well, among his loyal zealots, he can get away with that. The other 90% of the market, even the Microsoft Majority, has already voted with their wallets regarding how much of that they'll tolerate.

  11. Re:who cares? by filterban · · Score: 2, Interesting

    What, you mean, like Konqueror?

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  12. Re:Um... what? by amper · · Score: 2, Interesting

    Why I use Safari as mt primary browser instead of Firefox:

    1. More elegant UI (I admit, this is mostly preference. Firefox isn't bad, and *much* better on Windows at this point. Safari needs a lot of UI work on Windows.)
    2. The Google search bar (now the Google or Yahoo! search bar). Yes, Firefox has a search bar that supports more browsers, but it doesn't have a drop down list with my previous searches.
    3. Close buttons for each tab in each tab (yes, I know Firefox finally got on board with this in v2.0)
    4. Integrates with Apple's Keychain, so I only have to set up my encryption certificates once for both Mail.app and Safari.
    5. Safari is better at resuming stalled downloads.
    6. Private Browsing.
    7. iSync support for syncing bookmarks across multiple Macs.
    8. Better history feature. No sidebar required.

    This said, I still use Firefox and Thunderbird on both Mac OS X and Windows. Sometimes, a site won't render properly in Safari because of bad coding, and sometimes that same site will work in Firefox. On Windows, sometimes I even have to fall all the way back to IE, because Firefox doesn't work, either. Thunderbird I mainly only use for secondary accounts, because Thunderbird has a long, long way to go to catch up to Mail.app, but it's the only mail client I will use on Windows.

    But don't tell me there's no good reasons to use Safari over Firefox. I'm sure there's things about Firefox that some people like better than Safari, but for me Safari works much better.

  13. Re:Mozilla gets modded down by dbrutus · · Score: 2, Interesting

    I paid $500 for my Mac mini (working nicely as a specialty server), $700-$800 for my eMacs (getting long in the tooth) and expect to pop out several thousand on an xServe reasonably soon. Compared to Dell, HP, or IBM those are reasonable prices for the hardware I've gotten and am looking to get. Yes, you can get a lot less going "white box" but that's true for all the big brands.

    Sometimes Apple is high cost and other times it's actually lower than its competition. It really depends on the machine and software needs you have.