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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.
Yeah, like Gateway, Opera, XBox...wait a minute...
Presumably when another user is running a copy.
Game... blouses.
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.
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.
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.
Then uses hers to play Elton John and the Moulin Rouge soundtrack
Damn. I knew Slashdotters were hard up for female companionship, but this is over the top. Why don't you just stick to porn and wanking like the rest of us?
See my journal for slashdot ID's by year. Mine created in 2005. http://slashdot.org/journal/289875/slashdot-ids-by-year
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.
That's not at all how Apple operates. You're completely ignoring their real motives. They don't care if they own the dominant web browser. They know it's basically irrelevant to their business.
What Apple sells is a particular computing experience. To have people develop web apps for the iPhone they need the browser platform it runs on: Safari. So Safari on Windows lets non-Mac users develop iPhone applications (similar to OS X's Dashboard).
Apple does not care if only developers use Safari on Windows. As long as there's a lot of iPhone apps to download. Having people browse the web with Safari on Windows does nothing for Apple's bottom line. But as a development platform it's critical to their latest product.
Developers: We can use your help.
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.