14 DAY TRIAL // John Lilly, Mozilla's chief operating officer, is displeased with Apple's plans for Safari, and thinks that apple is not only being unrealistic, but also has a view that is bad for consumers everywhere. The big issue Lilly has is with Jobs' charts.
Firstly, he is less than pleased with the way Apple represents the current situation of the browser market. "We could quibble with the numbers, but close enough. It doesn't give much credit to the large & growing number of other quality browsers that are on the scene today, and certainly doesn't give any sophisticated understanding of the situation outside the United States, where things vary more. Close enough, though." It could be that Lilly was unaware that this was the WWDC keynote? as in Apple's World Wide Developer's Conference, not a web browser developer conference. It stands to reason that the people attending are not interested in, and probably don't have "sophisticated understanding of the situation outside the United States" when it comes to web browsers.
Moving swiftly along, Jobs then presented the chart showing how Apple would like things to be, with Safari holding about a quarter of the browser market share and Internet Explorer the rest. "Well we dream big. We would love for Safari's market share to grow substantially. That's what we'd love," Jobs said.
Of course, Lilly doesn't like this idea. "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."
Exactly what is wrong with a web with only two dominant browsers is unclear. Apple is arguably in control of the digital music player market and of the digital music download market, and everybody is happy, except for Apple's competition of course. Lilly must think that all monopolies are like Microsoft.
For some reason, Lilly thinks that this is a declaration of war on Apple's part as the Cupertino Company intends to go after the marketshare of every other browser out there except Internet Explorer. "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."
Paranoid much? Considering that Jobs has actually spoken over an image of Michael Dell with a bull's eye over imposed saying that Apple is coming after Dell, this is hardly a declaration of war. As for this being how they think of the problem, again, this was WWDC. It is an Apple conference for Apple developers, and it is called cheering. Of course Apple wants as much market share as possible, just like Mozilla would love to show such a chart and say that they hold a quarter of the browser market share with Internet explorer having the rest. Would Ballmer's 'Developers, Developers, Developers' chant would have been as effective if he had thrown in a 'Marketers' in there as to not leave anyone out?
Lilly goes on to say how this "isn't how the world should be," and that this "is the wrong thing to do." Last but not least, Lilly says that "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. The web belongs to people, not companies."
Statements such as these are the reason why some people simply should not blog. Safari supports open web standards, and has long passed the Acid2 test, but Firefox and many other browsers have not, except with betas and alphas of version yet to come. Safari is based on WebKit, which in turn is based on KHTML. WebKit itself is open source. The whole of OS X's inner workings is Open Source. Just how is Apple doing anything to take the web away from people?
If the people at Mozilla feel threatened by Apple and their Windows version of Safari, perhaps they should focus on developing a better product instead of clutching at straws and trying to pain the competition as being the Big Bad Developer.