It's not in Apple's interest to have old, buggy versions of Safari out there. They already have trouble getting people to support them for complex webapps (examples: Google Maps, gmail). Having multiple versions just compounds the testing and support costs for a small userbase.
And 18 months is still a very short cycle for corporate deployments (where they love Windows 2000 from 5 years ago), but that's probably not that important for Apple.
I'm not sure what the NDA situation is at public universities, but in private industry virtually everything bit of information you encounter is covered by an NDA. The free lunch I got today is probably covered by my NDA, as is any number of personal conversations had with friends and family.
Now obviously this was a high-level leak, and Apple has to follow up on it, but I'm quite skeptical of the "NDAs Ueber Alles" mentality displayed by yourself and the Apple defenders here. The reality is these agreements are very broad and could easily be used to run roughshod over other rights.
Please, Apple's sales figures are far below where they were back in the Performa days -- When anyone could go buy a magazine and read all about Apple's upcoming models. This secrecy crap has done nothing to sell computers, it's only about the perverse relationship between Jobs and his Fanboys.
And those people "banging down Apple's door" tend to the exact people who read the rumor sites anyway.
Virutaldub is GPL, and the GPL contains language which states all patent rights must be granted or the software can't be distributed. Meaning VirtualDub+ASF violated the GPL.
So, it's not clear that MS was trying to stomp a small developer through patents -- they might have just been worried about the "PacMan" thing -- that 3rd parties might be mislead by the GPL's patent grant.
Not just Eolas. Microsoft was also on the recieving end of a successful patent suit from Apple Computer not that long ago (ending in the "investment" which "saved Apple", or so the Apple&MS spin went).
Futhermore, MS believes their main competitor is IBM, who happens to be the king of patents, making $billions from enforcing them. And there's no reason to believe that IBM are nice guys here -- they're current enforcing their "GIF" patent against SCO, even though everyone just assumed it was invalid. IBM *could* go after the entire industry with this patent or many others.
The single process for multiple applications was one of the most sucky things about Nutscrape.
By the time Mozilla was being designed, IE had already shown the way with an extreme use of shared libraries. Apple and KDE followed that path. For something that was supposed to be a "development platform", I just don't understand the architectual decision to make a monolithic application.
On that note, it seems like the technical issues are on the backburner, and the main issue here is Firefox's slim UI. Couldn't there just be a "Super Preferences" dialog for the suite fans?
Office for Mac is missing nearly all of the corporate/collaboration features of the Windows version. In their place are more home user-friendly features like a note-taking app. Mac users can't even get a native Exchange client, so I wouldn't expect MS to include any advanced collaboration stuff like Groove in with Mac Office.
The deal is that Notes is it's own "Pubilic Key Infrastructure" (from long before any internet standards existed). Therefore, it's quite cheap and easy just to flip a couple switches and encrypt everything.
Deploying a replacement PKI system tends to be quite complex and expensive and would end up being nowhere as easy to use.
does it really matter whether there are five apps that each do one thing or one app that does five things?
As others are pointing out, Mozilla.org hasn't componentized the backend ("GRE") of the applicaitons yet. That means that Firefox and Thunderbird share very little compiled code, which is not good because they aren't very lightweight programs to begin with.
I guess Mozilla was designed from the beginning to be one big monolithic application , so discontinuing that application seems a little odd.
No, YOU better look at the facts again, and you'll that Microsoft got off on several crucial findings of law:
3. Microsoft is found not guilty of bundling of Internet Explorer with Windows
4. Microsoft is found not guilty of attempting to monopolize the Internet browser market
The "tying" charge was then dropped by the government.
You're obviously one of those people who doesn't let facts get in the way of their poorly formed opinions, but next time try a little harder not to look like an AC idiot, In other words, don't believe what your read on slashdot.
What is it that makes Firefox better than Mozilla?
Firefox is popular and Mozilla isn't.
Mozilla Appsuite and it's Netscape variant has been around about 5 years now and it's never gotten above 1% marketshare as far as I know, despite a fair amount of promotion. The program is obviously disliked by users because there's been millions and millions of downloads that haven't "converted" in the browser stats.
Since Firefox hit 1.0, it's been nothing but going up -- about 5-6% now and 10-15% is certainly realistic.
If there needs to be a 'triage; with dev resources, I can't imagine why they'd support a loser like AppSuite over Firefox. The point of Mozilla.org was to "take back the web", and that means putting out something consumers want to use.
The Clinton administration desprately wanted to to settle the case as well, but never came to an agreement that the states and MS found acceptable.
Rather than get angry at politicians, look to the appeals court which overrulled Jackson and found there was no merit to the charge that IE was "tied" to Windows. In otherwords, sticking IE into Windows was legal, and MS couldn't be punished for it, regardless of the administration in power.
Back on topic, AOL/Netscape walked away with $750 Million of Microsoft's money because of this whole thing. So if Mozilla.org is having resource problems, you might want to ask what happened to that money because only a small part went into browser development.
I don't see the situations as comparable at all -- In the "Copeland" case, Apple desperately needed an new OS and faced huge technical challenges in getting there.
Microsoft really doesn't need Longhorn at all, the core OS is in decent shape, the monopoly is chugging along, and they call add incremental features as downloads or service packs. Yeah, the next version of OS X will have more flash, but nobody has ever bought Windows because it's flashy. (Whereas Apple needs that consumer upgrade revenue.)
Avalon is already in Beta for XP and they've pretty much admitted that nobody was working on IE for the last few years.
The big news about really isn't WinFS or Avalon. It's the rewrite of the core APIs to support.NET. This is somewhat similar to Steve Jobs' NeXTStep project -- It's designed to make the whole thing more programmer-friendly, but may not provide any direct benefit to end users until years later.
Admittedly MS didn't get their monopolistic act together until there was a court order.
> Outlook and Excel and your other collab tools don't honor your default browser settings
Works here.
> a competitior to Safari in the higher end browser market, uses WebKit
And there's a dozen browsers that use MSHTML. I wouldn't really call any of them real competitors because they can't compete with better/faster HTML rendering like Mozilla or Opera can.
> Sorry, try again next time!
Where did I say it was evil? I think that was your concern. I was just commenting on the that Safari is just as integrated as IE on a nuts-n-bolts level (or will be in 10.4).
That all assumes that violating a shrinkwrap contract is copyright infringement.... certainly a discussion for another day.
(BetaMax was a little more complicated than that because it was advertised as "a great way to copy television programs off the air", and it wasn't clear if that was piracy or not. Turns out not.)
Apple can't sue the developers of Pear/Cherry because someone *might* use it to violate their OS X licence. They would have to sue individual OS X customer which is practically impossible.
From what you say: (A) Safari WebKit is an OS library (B) You can change your default browser
On Windows: (A) IE MSHTML is an OS library (B) You can change your default browser (although you are correct that it didn't always work in the past)
So I see no technical differences at all -- it seems like you are mainly objecting to "Good" Apple being compared to "Evil" Microsoft, but in this case Apple's following their lead.
the OSS world needs one sane, unified development API for its desktops....but nobody ever actually refutes what I'm saying, because they know I'm right.
I'll argue with you -- Do you have any idea how many APIs are avaliable to Windows desktop developers? There's probably 100s. Has that hurt Microsoft? Hell no.
The biggest problem in the Linux world is that Code Rules, and therefore these "APIs" become products in themselves.
There's absolutely no reason that an end user should know or care whether the developer used "Qt" or "Gtk". But *nix developers have insisted that the difference between these APIs be right in the user's face as some sort of retarded marketing effort. When the user complains, they simply say "Hey, if you want a working desktop, just make sure all of your programs use OUR API and not ANYONE ELSES".
And then developers go forth and rewrite every godamn program so that it "fits into their desktop" burning 1000s of hours that could have been used catching up to the commercial world.
Keep all the APIs, but kill the stupid "desktop war". Make it so the end user could care less what API or programming language your program uses.
I don't claim to understand the Mac Dev market, but I think the problem is that there's hundreds of thousands, if not millions of companies doing non-Mac development work.
I guess my point is that there's no fundemental difference between (later)TNG, DS9, Voyager, or Enterprise. It's all the same Berman Trek formula, that worked for a while but is now thoroughly worn out.
So, it's difficult to talk about the "good old days of TNG" as a normative thing, because Hollywood doesn't have a clue what the difference is.
When I do see a Mac job on craigslist (which is rarely), it's almost always Metrowerks/C++ for a commercial product and not Objective C/Cocoa.
I think the issue is that the vast majority of programming work is for internal/vertical applications or customization. But except for publishing, Macs are generally sold right to consumers, so there isn't much demand for custom Mac software. If there were, Obj-C would probably be big.
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It's not in Apple's interest to have old, buggy versions of Safari out there. They already have trouble getting people to support them for complex webapps (examples: Google Maps, gmail). Having multiple versions just compounds the testing and support costs for a small userbase.
And 18 months is still a very short cycle for corporate deployments (where they love Windows 2000 from 5 years ago), but that's probably not that important for Apple.
I'm not sure what the NDA situation is at public universities, but in private industry virtually everything bit of information you encounter is covered by an NDA. The free lunch I got today is probably covered by my NDA, as is any number of personal conversations had with friends and family.
Now obviously this was a high-level leak, and Apple has to follow up on it, but I'm quite skeptical of the "NDAs Ueber Alles" mentality displayed by yourself and the Apple defenders here. The reality is these agreements are very broad and could easily be used to run roughshod over other rights.
Please, Apple's sales figures are far below where they were back in the Performa days -- When anyone could go buy a magazine and read all about Apple's upcoming models. This secrecy crap has done nothing to sell computers, it's only about the perverse relationship between Jobs and his Fanboys.
And those people "banging down Apple's door" tend to the exact people who read the rumor sites anyway.
Thank the boys in Apple's marketing department.
Virutaldub is GPL, and the GPL contains language which states all patent rights must be granted or the software can't be distributed. Meaning VirtualDub+ASF violated the GPL.
So, it's not clear that MS was trying to stomp a small developer through patents -- they might have just been worried about the "PacMan" thing -- that 3rd parties might be mislead by the GPL's patent grant.
Not just Eolas. Microsoft was also on the recieving end of a successful patent suit from Apple Computer not that long ago (ending in the "investment" which "saved Apple", or so the Apple&MS spin went).
Futhermore, MS believes their main competitor is IBM, who happens to be the king of patents, making $billions from enforcing them. And there's no reason to believe that IBM are nice guys here -- they're current enforcing their "GIF" patent against SCO, even though everyone just assumed it was invalid. IBM *could* go after the entire industry with this patent or many others.
The single process for multiple applications was one of the most sucky things about Nutscrape.
By the time Mozilla was being designed, IE had already shown the way with an extreme use of shared libraries. Apple and KDE followed that path. For something that was supposed to be a "development platform", I just don't understand the architectual decision to make a monolithic application.
On that note, it seems like the technical issues are on the backburner, and the main issue here is Firefox's slim UI. Couldn't there just be a "Super Preferences" dialog for the suite fans?
Office for Mac is missing nearly all of the corporate/collaboration features of the Windows version. In their place are more home user-friendly features like a note-taking app. Mac users can't even get a native Exchange client, so I wouldn't expect MS to include any advanced collaboration stuff like Groove in with Mac Office.
The deal is that Notes is it's own "Pubilic Key Infrastructure" (from long before any internet standards existed). Therefore, it's quite cheap and easy just to flip a couple switches and encrypt everything.
Deploying a replacement PKI system tends to be quite complex and expensive and would end up being nowhere as easy to use.
does it really matter whether there are five apps that each do one thing or one app that does five things?
As others are pointing out, Mozilla.org hasn't componentized the backend ("GRE") of the applicaitons yet. That means that Firefox and Thunderbird share very little compiled code, which is not good because they aren't very lightweight programs to begin with.
I guess Mozilla was designed from the beginning to be one big monolithic application , so discontinuing that application seems a little odd.
No, YOU better look at the facts again, and you'll that Microsoft got off on several crucial findings of law:
3. Microsoft is found not guilty of bundling of Internet Explorer with Windows
4. Microsoft is found not guilty of attempting to monopolize the Internet browser market
The "tying" charge was then dropped by the government.
You're obviously one of those people who doesn't let facts get in the way of their poorly formed opinions, but next time try a little harder not to look like an AC idiot, In other words, don't believe what your read on slashdot.
What is it that makes Firefox better than Mozilla?
Firefox is popular and Mozilla isn't.
Mozilla Appsuite and it's Netscape variant has been around about 5 years now and it's never gotten above 1% marketshare as far as I know, despite a fair amount of promotion. The program is obviously disliked by users because there's been millions and millions of downloads that haven't "converted" in the browser stats.
Since Firefox hit 1.0, it's been nothing but going up -- about 5-6% now and 10-15% is certainly realistic.
If there needs to be a 'triage; with dev resources, I can't imagine why they'd support a loser like AppSuite over Firefox. The point of Mozilla.org was to "take back the web", and that means putting out something consumers want to use.
The Clinton administration desprately wanted to to settle the case as well, but never came to an agreement that the states and MS found acceptable.
Rather than get angry at politicians, look to the appeals court which overrulled Jackson and found there was no merit to the charge that IE was "tied" to Windows. In otherwords, sticking IE into Windows was legal, and MS couldn't be punished for it, regardless of the administration in power.
Back on topic, AOL/Netscape walked away with $750 Million of Microsoft's money because of this whole thing. So if Mozilla.org is having resource problems, you might want to ask what happened to that money because only a small part went into browser development.
There happens to be a rebate today on that model, but in general, the bare ones are cheaper. Sometimes the Ns are rebated and the XP ones aren't.
Play around and see -- Here's what I speced:
Dimension 3000
P4 3Ghz
512MB
base CDROM, HD, etc
$648 (-$50) for the XP Home version
$529 for the FreeDOS version
I don't see the situations as comparable at all -- In the "Copeland" case, Apple desperately needed an new OS and faced huge technical challenges in getting there.
.NET. This is somewhat similar to Steve Jobs' NeXTStep project -- It's designed to make the whole thing more programmer-friendly, but may not provide any direct benefit to end users until years later.
Microsoft really doesn't need Longhorn at all, the core OS is in decent shape, the monopoly is chugging along, and they call add incremental features as downloads or service packs. Yeah, the next version of OS X will have more flash, but nobody has ever bought Windows because it's flashy. (Whereas Apple needs that consumer upgrade revenue.)
Avalon is already in Beta for XP and they've pretty much admitted that nobody was working on IE for the last few years.
The big news about really isn't WinFS or Avalon. It's the rewrite of the core APIs to support
Can you name a single big brand box maker that sells a "linux ready" PC for less than the same model loaded with Windows?
Dell N-Series. Time to put that myth to bed.
Admittedly MS didn't get their monopolistic act together until there was a court order.
> Outlook and Excel and your other collab tools don't honor your default browser settings
Works here.
> a competitior to Safari in the higher end browser market, uses WebKit
And there's a dozen browsers that use MSHTML. I wouldn't really call any of them real competitors because they can't compete with better/faster HTML rendering like Mozilla or Opera can.
> Sorry, try again next time!
Where did I say it was evil? I think that was your concern. I was just commenting on the that Safari is just as integrated as IE on a nuts-n-bolts level (or will be in 10.4).
That all assumes that violating a shrinkwrap contract is copyright infringement .... certainly a discussion for another day.
(BetaMax was a little more complicated than that because it was advertised as "a great way to copy television programs off the air", and it wasn't clear if that was piracy or not. Turns out not.)
> I can see a lawsuit from Apple on the horizon
Apple can't sue the developers of Pear/Cherry because someone *might* use it to violate their OS X licence. They would have to sue individual OS X customer which is practically impossible.
From what you say:
(A) Safari WebKit is an OS library
(B) You can change your default browser
On Windows:
(A) IE MSHTML is an OS library
(B) You can change your default browser (although you are correct that it didn't always work in the past)
So I see no technical differences at all -- it seems like you are mainly objecting to "Good" Apple being compared to "Evil" Microsoft, but in this case Apple's following their lead.
the OSS world needs one sane, unified development API for its desktops. ...but nobody ever actually refutes what I'm saying, because they know I'm right.
I'll argue with you -- Do you have any idea how many APIs are avaliable to Windows desktop developers? There's probably 100s. Has that hurt Microsoft? Hell no.
The biggest problem in the Linux world is that Code Rules, and therefore these "APIs" become products in themselves.
There's absolutely no reason that an end user should know or care whether the developer used "Qt" or "Gtk". But *nix developers have insisted that the difference between these APIs be right in the user's face as some sort of retarded marketing effort. When the user complains, they simply say "Hey, if you want a working desktop, just make sure all of your programs use OUR API and not ANYONE ELSES".
And then developers go forth and rewrite every godamn program so that it "fits into their desktop" burning 1000s of hours that could have been used catching up to the commercial world.
Keep all the APIs, but kill the stupid "desktop war". Make it so the end user could care less what API or programming language your program uses.
It is certianly possible to build an Carbon application that is ABI/binary compatible with both OS X and MacOS 9.
I don't claim to understand the Mac Dev market, but I think the problem is that there's hundreds of thousands, if not millions of companies doing non-Mac development work.
I guess my point is that there's no fundemental difference between (later)TNG, DS9, Voyager, or Enterprise. It's all the same Berman Trek formula, that worked for a while but is now thoroughly worn out.
So, it's difficult to talk about the "good old days of TNG" as a normative thing, because Hollywood doesn't have a clue what the difference is.
When I do see a Mac job on craigslist (which is rarely), it's almost always Metrowerks/C++ for a commercial product and not Objective C/Cocoa.
I think the issue is that the vast majority of programming work is for internal/vertical applications or customization. But except for publishing, Macs are generally sold right to consumers, so there isn't much demand for custom Mac software. If there were, Obj-C would probably be big.