14 DAY TRIAL // Want an accurate perspective of the future of browser development? Then turn to Mozilla. The open source foundation saw Apple's Safari 3 for Windows coming a mile away. On June 11 2007, the Cupertino-based company announced through the voice of its Chief Executive Office Steve Jobs that its Safari browser, natively tied to the Mac platform will be transitioned to Windows Vista and Windows XP. But this was not news to Mozilla.
At the beginning of January 2007, the Mozilla Foundation posted a reference related to Safari among the information associated with its plans for Gran Paradiso, the upcoming version of Firefox. In the early stages of development for Firefox 3.0, Mozilla forecasted that Apple would convert the Safari browser to run on Windows and would connect it to iTunes. The scenario predicted by the open source foundation in early 2007 has taken form this week. Mozilla was dead-on in this context. And Steve Jobs indeed confirmed the strong connection that Apple will support between iTunes and Safari for Vista and XP.
Mozilla has been hard at work on Firefox 3.0 and is up to Gran Paradiso Alpha 5 milestone, having ended support for version 1.5 of the open source browser. According to the Foundation's initial plans, Firefox 3.0 is scheduled for availability later this year. In contrast, there is little word from Microsoft in relation to Internet Explorer 8. The Redmond Company is indeed dogfooding the next version of IE, but no additional details have been made public. IE8 is currently scheduled to hit the market towards the end of 2008, early 2009. IE and Firefox will be the main rivals of Safari on Windows and this is a market where Apple is the underdog. The fact of the matter is that Safari's market share on the Mac counts for nothing. On Windows, Apple will start from zero.