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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.
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.
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.
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...
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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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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."
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!
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.
"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.
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?
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.)