Oftentimes, we look at things on many different ways and our reactions sometimes depend on who commits the act and not if the act is inherently malicious.
Mozilla’s CEO, John Lily, has recently criticized Apple for sneeking in a Safari browser installation on a regular Apple Software Update. Mozilla Firefox is a competing browser to Apple Safari so others looked at his statement as a sign of threat:
What Apple is doing now with their Apple Software Update on Windows is wrong. It undermines the trust relationship great companies have with their customers, and that’s bad — not just for Apple, but for the security of the whole Web. What they did yesterday was to use their updater for iTunes to also install their Safari Web browser –what follows is some background and analysis.
He has point — a software update is supposed to be just for already-installed applications, not new or related products by the same company. This is not the first time Apple has did this. They done that with iTunes and Quicktime.
I don’t mind it really, since I know I have the option to uncheck that part of the update. Others though, esp. the click-happy ones, get past that part in a millisecond they wouldn’t even notice it.
Certainly, this practice is an industry norm. Microsoft is infamous for doing so, especially with Windows and Internet Explorer. But pundits look at Microsoft differently (mostly, as an evil empire) so another well-regarded company such as Apple doing the same normal marketing strategy will be frowned upon at more than the normal eyebrow’s height.
Linux parin! :-D