Mozilla flames Apple duopolistic world view

Apple chief executive Steve Jobs has come under fire from Mozilla over an alleged bid to divide up the browser market.

In a posting to his personal blog, Mozilla chief operating officer John Lilly said that Jobs and his company were " out-of-date, corporate-controlled, duopoly-oriented," and "not-the-web thinking, " when the Apple co-founder and CEO displayed an image portraying Safari and Internet Explorer as the only two browsers in the world while stating "this is what we'd love."

Jobs made the statement last week in his keynote at Apple's World Wide Developer Conference where he unveiled the Safari 3 Browser.

Jobs displayed a pie chart of the current distribution of the browser market, with Microsoft controlling 78 per cent, Firefox fifteen per cent, Safari five per cent, and other browsers two per cent. The executive then described the company's vision for the future, in which Apple's portion of the market would have completely overtaken Firefox's market share while having little impact on Microsoft.

Lilly, whose company maintains and distributes of the open source Firefox browser, took exception to the graph.

"This wasn’t a careless presentation, or an accidental omission of all the other browsers out there, or even a crummy marketing trick," wrote Lilly.

"This is, essentially, the way they’re thinking about the problem, and shows the users they want to pick up."

The problem, said Lilly, is not just that Apple may be targeting Firefox, but that the company envisions a duopoly in the browser market.

"It destroys participation, it destroys engagement, it destroys self-determination. And, ultimately, it wrecks the quality of the end-user experience, too."

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