Remember on Monday when Steve Jobs, Lord of all our Earthly realm, proclaimed Safari as the best browser ever and that Apple wanted to steal market share from Internet Explorer? The COO of Mozilla noticed that too and didn’t like it one bit. So he’s called Apple out.
On his personal Web blog, John Lilly questions Jobs’ view of the way the Internet works. Gone are the days, he says, where a top-down model drives the flow of information and gone are the days of one or two browsers dominating the Web browser scene. There’s plenty of room for Internet Explorer, Safari, Firefox, Opera, etc. That Apple wants to “control,” so-to-speak, the Internet vis-à-vis Safari is part of the old way of thinking—the new way is Wikipedia, Creative Commons, Linux, etc. People-drive, in other words. Apple’s “Safari will rule all” mantra is out of date.
Lilly doesn’t have any problem with Jobs wanting Safari to be the best it can be, of course. Who could? Better browsers beget better browsers all around. Everyone wins. But thinking that the Web is destined to become a two-broswer war of attrition is foolish.
I wonder if the honeymoon between Apple and—hell, it seems like everybody, doesn’t it?—is finally over?
A Picture’s Worth 100M Users??? [John’s Blog via Macworld UK]