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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.
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.
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.
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.
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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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You meant inferior, but I'll forgive you since I know you're using a mac and the keyboard has all the keys in funny places.
The Farewell Tour II
webkit has been open source for years. It was adobe who really did all the work getting safari to run in windows
So apple spends no time/money, opens a new source of google search bar revenue, AND gets a wider iphone "sdk"
Safari on windows was a success before Jobs announced it
Meanwhile, Abraxor has taken available data and projected that Firefox will overtake IE in August...
Apple's introducing a superior browser to Windows
You keep using that word. I don't think it means what you think it means.
We're on a Safari and we're hunting OSS browsers. (slaps self) I mean we're developing Safari and HURTING OSS browsers.
How last century. These days it's all YouTube Video Right Now.
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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"
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
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...
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.
This is where I get my recommended daily allowance of "Foot in Mouth."
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.
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
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.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
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.
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
That'd be bloody brilliant... Introduce a whole demographic to a new browser.
As Microsoft's shown, best way to introduce a user to a new program is to force it on them...
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.
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.
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.
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.
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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Adobe ported WebKit to run on Windows, but I don't think Apple used their work. Looking at the DLLs that ship with Safari on Windows, it seems that they used the OS X version and a compatibility layer, probably based on YellowBox.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
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."
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!
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.
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.
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.
"National Security is the chief cause of national insecurity." - Celine's First Law
So you're not Apple's target audience for Safari on Windows anyway.
what part of this picture and this picture is everyone having such a hard time comprehending? Apple's target audience, is all the users that don't use IE. Steve Jobs has clearly shown this.
Here's what I'm referencing. Jobs says: "Well we dream big. We would love for Safari's marketshare to grow substantially. That's what we'd love." Steve Jobs doesn't just want Safari available so people can test their websites quickly at their same Windows box, he want's all of the market share from Opera/Firefox/etc. If his graph would've shown market share eaten up from IE there wouldn't even be these discussions going on, but instead what we see is an inside look into Steve's view on how he wants the market to change.
"but money is the God of Algiers & Mahomet their prophet." - Rich. O'Bryen June 8th 1786
They're already TRYING to do this (at least with iTunes anyway).
I specifically downloaded Quicktime *without* iTunes, because quite frankly, I don't want iTunes. When there's an update for Quicktime, the updater pre-checks iTunes for download and installation. The same thing happened when I updated Safari.
I suspect that in the future, any updates for iTunes or Quicktime for Windows users will also contain the pre-checked box for Safari as well.
It's just a checkbox, but the default action of most users is to just keep clicking next until the funny little window is gone.
To me, it's underhanded.
I've got a nastly little anarchist streak in me. I think it'd be hilarious for the browser wars to play out like this. Download Windows update? IE takes control. Song off iTunes? Safari grabs control back.
Knock down drag out no holds barred browser war, np.
It's not terribly useful, though, because auto-complete is faster -- and Firefox's autocomplete also takes advantage of Google's suggestions feature to show me a list of searches I haven't even made yet. (Maybe Safari's does too... I haven't tried it, because Apple hasn't released a version that will work on any of the operating systems I use.)What's the point? If I want to close a tab, I middle-click on it, which is the default behaviour in Firefox. It's more convenient, because I don't have to hit a tiny close button, I can aim for anywhere on the tab. It's safer, because when I just want to select a tab, I can click anywhere on it with the left button, and not risk accidentally closing it. And it leaves more room on the tab for the name of the site.
Hey, it's not my fault if you bought a computer that only came with a one or two button mouse.
That said, I'd use Safari as well if I could - some sites don't work properly in Firefox, and Konqueror is painful to use. Sadly, Apple haven't released a Linux Safari, so I don't have that option.
Yeah, you'd think a person who doesn't know what a monopoly is would be modded up when making comments about them, huh?
Down with FOSS!! Long live Apple!!Umm, Apple is a FOSS contributor. Webkit (the engine behind Safari) is LGPL and Apple is one of the largest contributors.
No wonder the only way you get modded up is as "funny" your opinions are a joke.
Cocoa has worked on Windows for ages. NeXT used to sell an OpenStep developers environment that ran on Windows NT, and Apple released an updated version with the Rhapsody developers previews called 'YellowBox.' Whether they'll ever release it to the public again is debatable. One of the things people have been complaining about with the cancellation of 64-bit Carbon is that it makes cross-platform development hard (since most cross-platform toolkits are built on top of Carbon, which uses a similar programming model to the Windows API), so this might make it attractive to release Cocoa-for-Windows. I hope they don't, because it would probably be very bad for GNUstep...
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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
while I agree that the grandparent poster probably should have read the whole article, dosnt it seem kind of strange to be saying that you are happy that apple is releasing the brower on the one hand and complaining that they might be trying to take out your market share on the other hand?
Frankly I think this whole thing is paranoia. Just because jobs only chose to talk about IE (the predominant browser on windows) in his talk and on his slide, does not indicate that he is "hunting" OSS Browsers.
"In America, first you get the sugar, then you get the power, then you get the women..." -H. Simpson
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.
YellowBox, OpenStep, etc. are not Cocoa. Almost... but not quite.
I think everyone is misinterpreting that. Jobs isn't out to kill Firefox, a browser that's quite popular on the mac, the same way he showed in that keynote how he likes Apple's Boot Camp, Parallels Desktop, and VMware. Diversity of options was good in his opinion.
Clearly Jobs wants to take some market share away from IE, but if he made a pie chart of Safari FF and IE, he'd be flamed for being too overconfident against IE, or too pessimistic for only taking a sliver from IE. Instead, he moved the FF part of the pie, instead of saying his browser is 3rd place. Jobs touts open source a lot, and I strongly doubt he wants to kill firefox, like the FF fanboys are screaming about.
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?
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.
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"?
No, it was Safari. Take it from someone who followed Acid2 from the time it was announced. Even this list of Acid2 in major browsers, made by an Opera employee, credits Safari with making it there first.
The scrollbar controversy you're thinking of was with Konqueror and in iCab. Safari developers (well, mainly Dave Hyatt) wrote a lot of code to pass Acid2, but WebKit had already diverged enough that Konqueror's developers weren't able to just apply the patches he released. They had to reimplement most of the changes themselves. They and iCab both missed the scrollbar -- as did the Web Standards Project when they looked at the results -- because it wasn't mentioned in the guide. Months later, some Opera folks pointed out the scrollbar issue in those two browsers.
Actually, from the looks of that picture Jobs is actually targeting classic arcade gamers. Perhaps this is his solution for bringing more games to the Mac? Safari - now with Asteroids and Donkey Kong.
... and then they built the supercollider.
Why is ease of use only for computer illiterate people? Power users want ease-of-use too, so they can be more productive, and get more work done.
Anyway, how do you explain the vast proportion of Mac users who have been using their machines professionally in cutting-edge industries for years? Heck, for a long time, it was one of the few serious machines for digital imaging and publishing, because only Macs had Photoshop and coulor management. They are also popular in the scientific computing field. These are users who are so demanding of their machines that they don't have time to screw around.
Also, how do you explain the vast number of computer illiterate Windows users? You don't seem to have much experience of the Mac world, you are just making assumptions based on marketing. In my long experience of both sides, the proportion of technically knowledgeable Mac users is higher. That's probably because it's usually an informed decision, to choose a "different" option. Wheras someone who knows nothing about computers will usually just accept what the salesman pushes, or what is used at work - which is a Windows machine 99% of the time. They literally put no thought into their purchase.
Another thing I'vbe noticed with Windows users, is that they are generally much more confused about technology and terminology. For example, they think that Internet Explorer is the internet. Wheras most Mac users, even the biggest newbies, understand that a browser is just an application used to access the internet. There also seems to be a better understanding of the filesystem. Windows users often say "I saved the file in Word" - thinking that Word is where the files are stored, where a newbie Mac user is likely to understand it's on a disk, or in a folder separate to the application.
Anyway, enough of the explanation. I do find it amazing that you honestly believed what you said, because it is so contrary to how the Mac world actually is. Maybe you should go out and look at how it actually is, rather than just projecting your stereotypes onto a group you know nothing about?
... and then they built the supercollider.
P.S:
Such a person would not be the type to download and install Firefox on their own.This also shows some ignorance. Not only is Firefox very popular on the Mac, the market for shareware and independent applications is much healthier on the Mac than on Windows. If anything, Mac users are much more avid downloaders of new and different software than the average Windows user. You can ask some software developers who started developing for the Mac after years of Windows development to testify to this. They usually find that their downloads of demos and trial versions skyrocket when they port their product to Mac, and they find an enthusiastic user base.
In contrast, the average Windows user rarely ventures outside the standard Microsoft applications, except perhaps in the case of games. I wouldn't be surprised is Firefox actually had greater marketshare on the Mac platform than on Windows - because Windows users are so habituated to IE. There is also a thriving market of alternative text editors, word processors, and page layout apps on the Mac, which doesn't really exist for Windows, because everybody just uses Word.
... and then they built the supercollider.
Apple has this decidedly anti-free thing going on. The best offence for Apple at this time would be to show how many free projects like apache, samba, BSD, KHTML they are involved in.. or share interoperability of open standards. Instead Apple is totally silent about anybody BUT Apple.
Apple needs to show a market with 3-4 players in order to really grow. To be taken seriously, they need to show how they are at the top of the ecology of the "everybody-but-Microsoft" crowd. They should be reaching out a hand to Sun, Ubuntu, Red Hat, etc.. because by limiting themselves to hardware only, they automatically cut out large groups of software users that have existing hardware, or that Apple hardware doesn't meet the needs of. They should be quietly building a front against the big player. Instead they're worrying about what laptop a Samba developer will use at a presentation. They're totally out of line... totally thinking like a second-place company content to be second place because they can poke fun at the big dog and not get bitten.
IN this particular case, it's disingenuous for them not to include Konquerer, Opera, Firefox in any chart of web browsers because they COULD be working as a team with open standards. They could have shown that there are half a dozen standards-ready browsers out there that it's not just an Apple-only thing to develop for Safari. But instead they want ALL the limelight. So to the majority of corporate developers, it's still business as usuall.. Microsoft versus Apple.. the entire point being lost.
I don't agree that Apple are lacking in their support for open source - Apple run their projects as open source when available (you can't open source company secrets and as a result they don't open those older projects to the community). They also use open source throughout their operating system. (http://www.apple.com/opensource/) details some of their open source efforts in osx. Whether directed by apple or otherwise. Apple have also been disproportionately light on litigious affairs with open source vendors. Particularly important when you consider that the expose feature in OS X is actually patented by Apple. (Despite this many enjoy it in ubuntu and other xgl implementations.)
Turning a blind eye and only engaging in litigation where contracts with partners (usually the music industry) require them to do so is an often unrecognised merit to the company's management.
http://www.macosforge.org/ lists many of the bigger apple led open source projects.
Also including all the standards compliant browsers on the slide isn't a good idea for a whole world of obvious reasons. (It's not got much to do with a need for being in the limelight.. it was an apple developer conference, apple -is- in the limelight there.)
you can't open source company secrets and as a result they don't open those older projects to the community.
Nonsense. Apple can open source any of their own IP they want to. They just don't want to.