Man, you gotta love a good buzz phrase. And that’s a good one. It comes from this:
When Mozilla CEO John Lilly lit into Apple for using its software update utility to push Safari to Windows users, he knew he was going to get a rise out of Apple fans.
"I wasn't surprised by the reaction," said Lilly yesterday, talking about the criticism he has received from many online who took exception to his calling Apple's use of the utility "a bad practice" that "ultimately undermines the safety of the Internet."
"When you put Mozilla users and Apple users together, sometimes they poke at each other with sharp sticks," said Lilly. "But I would hope it's not about seeing everything through a partisan lens. This isn't about that. It's not even about [Apple] using the Updater as their distribution channel. It's just about the promise that people make when you provide a security update."
"Apple is a very hard organization to get critical of," he said. "There's always an outpouring of defensive comments.
"Actually, I'm really encouraged by that. It shows the participatory nature of the Internet," Lilly added. "This is a subtle nuanced issue, but this isn't us vs. them."
"The world is a complex place," said Lilly. "There are new offerings on the Internet all the time, and we're all trying to figure out together how to be respectful of users."
This time, though, he made it clear that he thought Apple had stepped over the line. And he was unrepentant for taking on the company. "I think they've undermined the work that we're doing on security and updates," he said.
So we’re sort of beating and “old issue” to death, some might argue. Except that Apple is still pushing its woefully inadequate, buggy, and insecure browser on users in exactly the same manner. I don’t mind being tiring on this issue: Apple’s wrong and they need to stop doing this.
