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Is Apple Gunning for Firefox?

Update: I got a couple of comments very quickly from Mozilla people complaining that this post is rehashing old news and is needlessly inflammatory.  I admit that I did hesitate to address this topic since the keynote in question was so long ago, but I felt like the issue was in the news again and was curious to know what others thought. I’d consider deleting the post entirely, but I don’t like revising history so I just removed the slides, which struck some as particularly provocative. If you’re interested you can find them in John’s original post.

In the comments to yesterday’s post, Marc Diethelm points to an intriguing piece by John Lilly, Mozilla’s CEO. The post dates from last June, but the issue it raises with respect to Apple’s ambitions in the web browser market is equally relevant today, perhaps even more so as the release of Safari 3.1 marks a big step forward for the browser as a serious competitor on Windows.

Clearly John was paying close attention during the 2007 WWDC keynote, where Steve Jobs announced the release of Safari for Windows. John first notes a simplistic if not inaccurate breakdown of the current browser market. Nothing particularly notable so far. Not so the next slide, which flashes briefly on the screen as Jobs comments that “we would love for Safari’ market share to grow substantially.”

What the…? Instead of showing a Safari slice that has grown at the expense (proportionally) of all of its hapless competitors, it has eaten up Firefox and “other” while leaving Internet Explorer untouched. John’s explanation is simple:

This world view that Steve gave a glimpse into betrays their thinking: it’s out-of-date, corporate-controlled, duopoly-oriented, not-the-web thinking.

In other words, not only are Apple’s marketing people such drones that they can only see the world as a clash of corporate titans, but they can’t help but make this stance evident in a high-profile public presentation. I can’t blame John for jumping on this, but it doesn’t make much sense to me. Everything I’ve heard and read about Apple and Jobs indicates that they see Microsoft as evil incarnate, not as their cuddly corporate comrade in arms.

So what are the alternate explanations. John rejects the idea that the second slide was simply a slip up:

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.

Another theory is that Jobs was keen, for some reason, to fire a volley across Firefox’s bow, perhaps to provoke exactly this type of reaction from Mozilla’s top brass. Maybe he sees IE as such a weak competitor that it makes sense to gun explicitly for a technologically stronger player.

Or perhaps, on the contrary, he was afraid of Microsoft’s reaction if he made his true intentions clear. Better to lull them into a sense of complacency until you’re ready to exterminate them. This would be easier to swallow, however, if he didn’t spend an entire minute right before the Safari announcement making ruthless fun of Microsoft over their convoluted Vista pricing policy.

Personally I keep going back to the idea that someone at Apple simply screwed up. They were asked to make a slide that showed Safari’s swelling market presence, possibly at the last minute, and like the dwarf-endangered Stonehenge in Spinal Tap, the request was misunderstood with somewhat comical consequences. The best evidence I have for this (though admittedly flimsy) are the pictures of Jobs that accompany the slides. In the first, he seems positively exuberant. In the second, he looks sheepish as he hurries on to the next slide. Could it be that he was as shocked as the rest of us?

Almost a year has passed, and Apple and Mozilla continue to lock horns. Any new insights into what Jobs had in mind?