June 15th, 2007
Firefox is on Steve Jobs' hit list!
John Lilly, Mozilla’s COO, spotted something that I hadn’t noticed about Steve Jobs Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC) keynote the other day.
They say that a picture is worth a thousand words, so here’s two thousand words worth of images for you:
Notice how Steve seems to be indicating that Safari will wipe out the competition and leave only IE and Safari in the running.
Some of you will probably be thinking that this is some kind of oversight or or mistake by Apple. Lilly doesn’t think so:
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.
This is just another example of Steve Jobs being once again blinded by his own reality distortion field. It also goes to prove that those that say that Safari 3 for Windows is merely aimed at developers are totally wrong - where the heck would Jobs find so many iPhone developers? Not on this planet for sure.
I’ve been using Safari 3 for Windows on and off since the beta was released the other day and apart from the pimped-up inline find and a few other nuggets, there’s nothing that makes Safari 3 stand out. In fact, from the critical perspective of stability, Safari 3 is by far the worst browser I’ve ever used. Crashes and lockups are common for me on both Vista and XP. The only reason that we’ll be seeing people using Safari 3 will be because it comes from Apple, and there aren’t many of those running Windows. There’s no way that Safari is going to erode Firefox’s market share - at least not unless the guys at Cupertino fire up the photocopiers and add features like add-ons to Safari 3. 100 million users? No way.
But there you have it folks. Steve Jobs wants to kill off Firefox (and Opera) and re-instate a new two-browser regime.
Thoughts?
Adrian is a technology journalist and author who has devoted over a decade to helping users get the most from technology. He also runs a popular blog called The PC Doctor. See his full profile and disclosure of his industry affiliations
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| 06/16/07
