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.

Comments

What about google and FF

[ducomputergeek]

I generally use Safari on Mac for most of my websurfing, but sites with invision board and a couple others don't render correctly. Plus if I want to do anything with google documents or pages or any number of their other services, I had to download Firefox. I argue that this is vendor lock in no different than MS or Apple. It may be Free and Opensource, two key buzzwords, but it's still vendor lock in.

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.

iPhone already hacked!

[objekt]

If you are using one right now (not likely, I know), I urge you NOT to click on this link

Re:The shoe is on the other foot

[mashade]

Funny, I saw this as a "Jealousy" move from the beginning. What else could be the motive? They're jealous of Firefox' exposure, especially since more folks on Mac seem to run Firefox than Safari. I wrote a quick blog post about it when the news broke.

Apple Couldn't Stand the Heat

You are dead wrong.

[NDPTAL85]

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?

Re:Mozilla gets modded down

[code65536]

Riiiiiiight. Just ask the KHTML guys how open they think Apple really are...