Mozilla slams Jobs over Windows Safari

Mozilla's chief operating officer John Lilly has hit out at Apple's Steve Jobs, calling his plans for building Safari's market share "out of date" and "duopolistic".

Lilly made his comments following Jobs' recent keynote at Apple's worldwide developers conference, where the Mac maker unveiled a version of the Safari browser that is designed to run on Windows Vista or XP.

In the speech predicting how Apple would grow its market share, Jobs showed a slide with Safari dominating almost a quarter of the market - a market only shared with a single other browser, Internet Explorer.

Lilly doesn't believe this was an ommission or simplification but instead an indication that Jobs is hoping to steal the users of Firefox and other smaller browsers in order to run a "duopoly" with Redmond.

He said in his blog: "This world view that Steve gave a glimpse into betrays [Apple's] thinking: It's out-of-date, corporate-controlled, duopoly-oriented, not-the-web thinking.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 two-party world will really come to be."

A browser market split exclusively between two companies is the "wrong thing to do" and would cause a dip in end-user experience, as well as ruining participation and engagement, the Mozilla Foundation exec said.

Lilly, however, went on to welcome the latest addition to the browser market, saying: "Another browser being available to more people is good. I'm glad that Safari will be another option for users... 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."

Jo Best writes for ZDNet Australia