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Tick in the Box

Mozilla CEO John Lilly's out pretending there are windmills to be charged.

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'John Lilly is movin' on up. Not to a dee-luxe apartment in the sky mind you, but to the role of CEO', wrote the super-cool Terrence Russell on 8 January of this year. You'll see Lilly's pic further down the page. Looks like another cool dude. Step aside, Daniel Craig. Normally people take a while to 'get warm in their clothes' on a new job but not John Lilly. He's out swinging already. On his stupefyingly formatted blog 21 March our John Lilly seemed to really get upset at something Apple did. 'It undermines the trust relationship great companies have with their customers', he wrote whilst fighting back tears of outrage. For what Apple did was bad 'for the security of the whole web'. Wow. Now that's a real mouthful. And Lilly goes farther, claiming Apple's behaviour 'borders on malware distribution practices'. That's bold grownup talk! What did Apple do? Put a tick in a box. Yep: a bloody tick in a bloody box. Stop the presses. Call home the soldiers. Cancel the elections. Apple put a tick in a box! Our John was probably downloading his latest copy of groovy iTunes™ (with QuickTime™ natch) and he noticed amidst this space age ergonomically pleasant screen real estate a second product listed and its box already ticked. Whoa. Fighting ticks! Now a bit of sell. 'Safari for Windows is the fastest-and-easiest-to-use web-browser for the-PC' says the description. 'It displays web-pages faster-than-any-other-browser and is filled-with innovative-features — all delivered in an efficient-and-elegant user-interface.' Foul! This is indeed serious business, John! Thanks for bringing it up! OK now let's grow up - and at least try to act older than John Lilly looks. It's a bloody tick box! Here's the equivalent on a Leopard box about to undergo an update. All the boxes are already ticked. OK they're not as pretty as the cute tick boxes on Windows but who's counting? They're all ticked. And on this particular box there are several components conspicuous in their absence so it's not a question of updates - this is 'new software'. Doesn't seem to upset any Apple users. No: what John Lilly is actually ticked off about is something else. As if. John Lilly is watching as his miniscule 'corporation' get eclipsed by a more commercial one. One with a reputation for 'class'. One with an incredible communication channel with their iTunes™ that sits on perhaps several hundred million Windows computers today. Nothing wrong with Firefox at all - on the contrary. But Moz were hard put to pony up for a $75 K New York Times spread. Moz have perhaps 100 on board; Apple have two hundred times that and are Fortune 500. Moz can possibly make Fortune 500,000. Apple have an incredible edge over Moz here and John Lilly knows it. He can see his company evaporating away before his very eyes. And just wait until the iPhone takes off - what's going to happen then? Oops. Meanwhile the BLOGOSPHERE are of course going wild with this one. As if they don't have anything else to write about or think about. And they don't. The Goober wrote a one word comment on it: 'interesting'. Only someone with his lacklustre pointless life could devote so much time to such non-issues. Which leaves only this site. Why an article here? Easy. No opinion whatsoever on Apple vs Moz. That's not the point. The point is someone is feigning outrage and people are sick and tired of reading about it. It's a bloody tick. In a bloody box. A bloody green tick mark in a bloody box. Oh - the EULA said you shouldn't install on non-Apple hardware. A clerical error. Grow up and move on. A bit of advice to the open sorcerers: don't publish your picture if you're the kind of nonce gets laughed out of town by the One Legged Hooker™. And a quick thank you to the blog posters. And keep it up - you make all our lives so much easier.

Much to do about nothing! The problem here is clear: Mozilla's CEO is intimidated by the competition.
- 'James'
I just ran Apple Software Update here and sure enough it's giving me Safari by default even though I have never installed it. Very poor practice indeed. Hopefully this story will hit some big news sites so that they can be publicly shamed.
- 'Dan'
This is just a sick way of tricking users to download their browser by making it seem as if an update if [sic] available for a piece of software already installed. I bet it even takes over as the default browser afterwards, which would look very bad on Apple.
- 'Kurt'
As a Mac user I'm feeling a little less good about Apple right now. Thank you for posting this John I hope this issue gets the publicity it deserves. It is fair to say that this is indeed malware distribution practices. Come on Apple are you 'that' desperate?!
- Ian Hayward
I could not disagree more with your comments. In fact they angered me so much I have deinstalled [sic] FireFox [sic] on my Mac at home and the Macs and PCs at my laboratory. From now on we will use Safari and MSIE.
- Len Peruski
This is the biggest NON-ISSUE yet - and anyone using a computer that can't use that screen and make a good decision should go back to a typewriter.
- 'slb'
Instead of Apple Software Updaters being welcome on my system I now have to treat them as rogue programs that can corrupt my system and trojan horses that can try to sneak unwanted software that I never asked for onto my system. Oh and by the way I will never use Safari as my main browser as it doesn't have middle mouse auto scroll.
- 'Joe Bloe'