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Mozilla COO John Lilly believes that Apple wants to create a duopoly in the browser market at the expense of Firefox, Opera and other browsers, which Lilly calls "a blurry view of the real world."
In a post to his blog last week Lilly [points to the slides Jobs used at the recent WWDC][1] which showed the current browser market in the first slide and then Apple's vision in the second slide which is, apparently, a world in which Internet Explorer and Safari are the only options.
As Lilly says, this sort of vision isn't exactly forward thinking:
>It destroys participation, it destroys engagement, it destroys self-determination. And, ultimately, it wrecks the quality of the end-user experience, too. Remember (or heard about) when you had to get your phone from AT&T? Good times.
However, given that the initial beta of Safari 3 for Windows received what might diplomatically be called a lukewarm reception, not to mention the numerous security flaws already discovered, it would seem that Mozilla might not need to worry just yet.
Some reports have spun Lilly's post as a case of sour grapes, but a quick glance at the slides in question (see below) *is* a revealing look at how Apple is approaching the market: eliminate the small competitors.
Part of that may be simple pragmatism -- for all its faults IE continues to dominate the market -- but Firefox has already showed that it is possible to eat into IE's market share so why doesn't Apple see that as a possibility?
Lilly thinks it's a result of Jobs' misunderstanding of what users want.
>So here’s my point, to be clear: another browser being available to more people is good. I’m glad that Safari will be another option for users. (Watch for the Linux port Real Soon Now.) 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.
>This world view that Steve gave a glimpse into betrays their thinking: it’s out-of-date, corporate-controlled, duopoly-oriented, not-the-web thinking.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.
I know it will never come to be on my desktop, you can pry Firefox out of my cold dead hands, but I'm curious what Compiler readers think. Is Apple out of touch with the mass of internet users? Microsoft rather famously failed to see the potential of the internet in the early '90s and paid a heavy price, is Apple making a similar mistake in believing the Safari can win over Firefox and Opera users? Let us know what you think in the comments below.
[1]: http://john.jubjubs.net/2007/06/14/a-pictures-worth-100m-users "A Picture’s Worth 100M Users???"
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