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.

I have a MBP...

[imperio]

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.

Re:what Apple/Jobs should do is:

[Bootle]

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

Ummm...it is open source...well sorta....

[Anonymous Coward]

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"

Re:On not being #3

[moderatorrater]

Yeah, like Gateway, Opera, XBox...wait a minute...

Unfounded

[TheBearBear]

From the TFA

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 :P

Re:Imminent Death of FireFox Predicted. JPGs at 11

[Bearpaw]

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.

Re:Apple on Windows

[gowen]

On Windows XP. Log in as a user, start iTunes. Now "Switch user" without logging out, and log in again as another user. Now try and start iTunes.

1996 called

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:what Apple/Jobs should do is:

[TheRaven64]

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.

No, not really.

[JLavezzo]

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."

Re:Not about market share

[bunratty]

Right. In my post and the one I was responding to, "they" refers to Mozilla. Mozilla has a 15 [hitslink.com] to 25 [w3counter.com]% share depending on which web stats you believe. In comparison, the share of OSX users is only about 4 to 5% of desktop computers. Safari will have to become very popular on Windows before it's even the #2 browser. If they come out with such a superior browser that so many users want to switch, that can only be a good thing, as John Lilly has said.

Re:Um... what?

[ak3ldama]

So you're not Apple's target audience for Safari on Windows anyway.
what part of this picture [flickr.com] and this picture [flickr.com] 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. [jubjubs.net] 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.

Re:Um... what?

[Haeleth]

Yes, Firefox has a search bar that supports more browsers, but it doesn't have a drop down list with my previous searches.

What? Of course it does. Click in search bar, and press down arrow. Drop-down list full of previous searches appears.

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.)

Close buttons for each tab in each tab

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. :P

Safari is better at resuming stalled downloads.

Quite possibly. I don't use Firefox for big downloads - that's what dedicated download programs like wget are for.

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.

Re:I have a MBP...

[pebs]

Perhaps you meant Mail(.app). In that case, I'd have to rate your opinion-making skills as "weak". Mail is way better than Thunderbird.

Ever use Mail.app for IMAP? For multiple IMAP accounts? If you didn't have problems with IMAP you are lucky.

I've used Mail.app for a while with IMAP. There were workarounds I had to do to get it to work with 1 account and that was problematic enough even after the workaround. With 2 accounts it was unusable.

I switched back to Thunderbird as well, at least it has working IMAP support. It also has a few features Mail.app doesn't have, like tags.

I'll give Mail.app another chance with Leopard. But until then, I'll have to agree with the other guy, Mail.app is weak.

Re:Pie Chart is all about marketing

[the linux geek]

Bullshit. They directly compare two charts - one with IE, Safari, and FF, and then a "future chart," with only IE and Safari.

Re:Um... what?

[mini me]

YellowBox, OpenStep, etc. are not Cocoa. Almost... but not quite.

No.

[amake]

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"?

Re:Who Cares About Motivation or Desires?

[Kelson]

You're wrong. Opera passed it first. On top of that, Safari didn't disable scrollbars until almost a year after they first claimed to pass it (disabling scrollbars is required by the Acid2 test).

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 [howtocreate.co.uk], 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.