As I commented on Asa Dotzler’s blog:
I watched the WWDC 2007 keynote online and I don’t know if they were being deliberately provocative or if it was just an unintentional snub, but Jobs had a graph up showing the browser market share as a pie chart; IE was at 78% as I recall, Firefox at 15%, Safari at 5% and ‘Others’ at 2%… When he talked about expanding Safari’s market share, it expanded to only cover Firefox and Other, without touching IE’s.
If that was intentional, it was certainly irresponsible; the web would benefit from *more* diversity, not less. Also, wiping out a good open source program like Firefox would be a shame :) But I suspect it was just done to make the graph look nice ;)
I note that John Lilly, COO of Mozilla, has a blog post up (from which I linked these pics :) in which he makes it known that he doesn’t think it was a mistake, but more importantly:
This world view that Steve gave a glimpse into betrays their thinking: it’s out-of-date, corporate-controlled, duopoly-oriented, not-the-web thinking.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.
I really have to wonder about something though; to what extent does Jobs consider Firefox a threat to Apple? Its obvious that Firefox is eating IE for lunch on Windows, but is the same thing happening (or starting to happen) to Safari on the Mac OS too?
[Update: as per ITWire, Safari on Mac is in the 75-85% range, similar to the IE on Windows share]
[Update 2: See Roughly Drafted for a reply to John Lilly’s comments from a Mac perspective]
Limulus 
Leave a comment