Mozilla slams Apple's duopolistic view

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

Mozilla chief operating officer John Lilly said in a posting to his personal blog that Jobs and his company were "out-of-date, corporate-controlled, duopoly-oriented" and "not-the-web thinking".

Lilly was referring to Jobs' displaying an image portraying Apple's Safari and Microsoft's 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 Worldwide Developer Conference at which he unveiled the Safari 3 browser.

The Apple chief displayed a pie chart of the current distribution of the browser market, showing Microsoft controlling 78 percent, Firefox 15 per cent, Safari five percent and 'other browsers' two percent.

Jobs then described the company's vision for the future, in which Apple had overtaken Firefox in browser market share while having little impact on Microsoft.

Lilly took exception to the graph. "This was not a careless presentation, or an accidental omission of all the other browsers out there, or even a crummy marketing trick," he wrote.

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

The problem, according to 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," he stated.