14 DAY TRIAL // John Lilly, Mozilla's Chief Operating Officer, blasted Apple's Chief Executive Office Steve Jobs over Safari on Windows. Lilly claims that Jobs focuses on driving Firefox out of the browser market that Apple will then dominate in tandem with Microsoft. The official position of the open source Foundation in relation to Apple's Safari 3.0 for Windows is that a new browser and fresh competition are welcomed. But then again, there is little elbow room on the browser market outside of the shares divided by Microsoft, Mozilla and Apple. And so far, Safari has been confined to the Mac OS X platform. Jobs' perspective is that Safari on Windows and IE will end up dividing the browser market into two slices, with none left for the competition.
"This world view that Steve gave a glimpse into betrays their thinking: it's out-of-date, corporate-controlled, duopoly-oriented, not-the-web thinking. And it's not good for the web. Which is sort of moot, I think, because I don't think this 2 party world will really come to be. Steve asserted Monday that Safari on Windows will overturn history, attract 100M new users, and revert the world to a 2 browser state. That remains to be seen, of course. But don't bet on it," Lilly stated.
At the debut of this week, Safari 3.0, now 3.01 after the first security updates, was made available on 32-bit and 64-bit Windows Vista and Windows XP. With IE dominating the browser market at over 78%, and Firefox accounting for a share of 15%, plus Safari's 5% for the Mac, it is obvious that the browser face-off on Windows will have three participants. And Apple has already indicated strong signs of adoption as Safari was downloaded over 1 million times in just 48 hours.
Lilly provided the images that I bundled into one and included at the top. In the first screenshot from Jobs' keynote at Apple Worldwide Developers Conference 2007, the Cupertino-based company's CEO was discussing the browser market and the shares of the rival products. Lilly believes that the second image betrays both Jobs and Apple indicating that the browser market will be shared exclusively between Safari and Internet Explorer with Firefox and all other competition out of the books. "Well we dream big. We would love for Safari's marketshare to grow substantially. That's what we'd love," Jobs said as cited by Lilly.
"Fantastic! Dream big! Imagine a world of?wait for it?access to the web controlled by 2 companies - and why not just go with the 2 dominant operating system vendors in the world. 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. Lots of words describe Steve & 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," Lilly commented on a blog post.