Mozilla Exec Claims Apple is Hunting OSS Browsers 539
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.
Pie Chart is all about marketing (Score:3, Interesting)
Imminent Death of FireFox Predicted. JPGs at 11. (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Apple on Windows (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Um... what? (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Um... what? (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Nothing to Worry About... (Score:2, Interesting)
Wake Up and Smell the Capitalism (Score:2, Interesting)
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".
Competition (Score:3, Interesting)
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...
Re:Um... what? (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Apple on Windows (Score:3, Interesting)
Because modern computers can easily handle multiple users, perhaps? Because I can set up one decent machine running Win2k3 and several cheap-ass XP boxes RD'ing into the decent one (I would ahave said "one decent Linux box and several diskless remote X servers, but considering iTunes' fabulous Linux support...)? Because I just want to, and don't really need a better reason?
So you can listen to two songs simultaneously?
And if I want to do exactly that, a program should prevent me from doing so because?
Seriously dude, of all the things to complain about that's a really bad example.
No, actually, it pretty much hits the nail on the head regarding why I will never own a Mac until Steverino departs the scene... In his world, you do things his way, or no way at all. Well, among his loyal zealots, he can get away with that. The other 90% of the market, even the Microsoft Majority, has already voted with their wallets regarding how much of that they'll tolerate.
Re:who cares? (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Um... what? (Score:3, Interesting)
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.
Re:Mozilla gets modded down (Score:1, Interesting)
If you pay a lot of money for something, you've committed to your decision. Therefore, most people will defend that decision against anything including sound logic. It's kind of amusing that our actions define our beliefs and not the other way around
Re:Pie Chart is all about marketing (Score:5, Interesting)
Apple's marketing was always extreme, and that is their style for as long as Jobs is on top.
This achieves few things:
- The core of Mac users become even more devoted to the Apple brand (it's sort of like a cult, it doesn't matter sometimes Jobs says ridiculous things).
- The rest of the world sees Apple as arrogant, sometimes foolish, but always and always interesting nonetheless.
- Which on the other hand makes Apple a great news material, and gains it a huge media coverage.
So the bottomline: they're doing what they have to, to survive. The "reality distortion field" of Jobs isn't a myth - it's very real, and the guy's doing it to get the exact effects he gets.
Apple always tries to create its own bubble where it competes with mythical collective enemies such as "The PC", "Microsoft", "The rest of the Phones", "The rest of the browsers". To support this bubble, you need the extreme kind of marketing Jobs does, otherwise it falls a apart and Apple will have to compete in the real market like any other company.
Jobs uses bubbles in his own company as well. Many people know that he would separate his employees in "buubles" and let them "fight" each other (in their work) to full exhaustion (such was the case with Apple II and Lisa teams). The other team is the enemy, and you gotta do everything humanly possible to support your own bubble.
Re:Nothing to Worry About... (Score:1, Interesting)
Apple supposedly has millions of Safari users on the Mac. I do have some problems with FireFox viewing some pages, usually with regards to embedded video and media plugins. MySpace is especially of note. Just ran across another neat site with a video of a Telsa coil's resonance being modulated causing it to play musical notes [hauntedfrog.com]. I had to load it in Safari to see the video.
I think Apple is picking up more users from the PC who are switching over, but I think they will have a harder time getting these users to drink their kool-aid. My other friend recently renounced iTunes finally seeing some of its flaws. I could always be wrong, I tend to get stuck with the linux geek perspective on things, and the Firefox experience on the Mac definitely still has room for improvement.
Sadly my Mac desktop mostly runs VMware to use XP for filesharing and various utils, and linux for a lot of the other stuff. The Mac desktop is gorgeous. But that's about it. I'm not at all convinced that many of the Mac apps are better. Simpler, no options, no configurability, less powerful. Definitely yes. If you haven't experienced Windows and Linux, you just don't know what your missing and you think it's simple and works perfectly. But if you're just stepping into it, it makes you feel like you've just been bound and gagged and shoved in a tiny little box and told it's for your own good.
Re:Mozilla gets modded down (Score:3, Interesting)
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.
Re:Um... what? (Score:2, Interesting)
1.) Identify the alternative, we download our own browser market, and evaporate this pie-segment in your presentation. ..or
2.) Target the only people who single-handedly used illegal tactics to make ruins of the web browser market leader (Microsoft's assult on netscape.) .. or
3.) Attack the market share of one of your largest share holders with an already strained relationship (MS bought $150M in Apple stock, and killing Office for the mac will make a significant dent in Apple business sales.)
If you picked 2 or 3, then you're in the same paranoid boat that the Mozilla crew is in. (Note Mozilla also got mightly pissed off when Apple chose kHTML over Mozilla for the basis of webkit. So there is a bit of history there.)
For those that don't seem to be noticing what's going on, it's actually a push for standards and not a fight between open source web browsers. FF3 will have good standards adherence, as does Safari. Put together all the mozilla and webkit (thinking nokia & iphones here too) web browsers and you have a growing number of websites that can't afford to discount standards for a small percentage loss. It's a very real possibility that before the end of the next year 30% of browsers will be standards compliant. Then say goodbye to internet explorer only technologies, making web browsing universal and not platform dependent. (that is IE on Windows.)