« Beowulf | Main | New Design »

Mozilla.org's Mitchell Baker has posted an article about Browser innovation and their future. One part deals with Safari and Camino:

"In addition to the Mozilla-based browsers, Apple has recently launched its own browser for Mac OS X, known as Safari. It may be that the majority of Mac end users will end up using Safari because it comes with the OS, just as many people end up using IE because it comes with the Windows distribution. Some see this as traumatic or as a mark of doom. But the Mozilla project understands that almost everyone in the US market (and a substantial percentage of the international market) receives Internet Explorer when they acquire a computer, and our job is to provide an alternative. We would have preferred to have Apple use Gecko or collaborate with us on the development of the Camino browser, but providing an alternative to an OS-sponsored browser is nothing new to us. The key goal of the Mozilla project is to help keep content on the web open and help keep access to that content from being controlled by a single source. Apple's decision to ship a browser based on an open source rendering engine, with a focus on standards compliance, is a good thing for the big picture goal"

This is a good attitude they are taking. I've seen some people around the Mozillazine forums and even other developers taking a reall negative attitude about it (often because they are anti-apple trolls anyways). The big thing here is that both Safari and Camino are great browsers using great open source engines (kHTML and Gecko). IE will be eliminated on the Mac platform and the majority of people will start using open source rendering engines.