That is a great point. ... and without Firefox, how painful would it have been to wrest control of the internet away from IE6? Would Apple have even had a chanc

That is a great point. ... and without Firefox, how painful would it have been to wrest control of the internet away from IE6? Would Apple have even had a chance, or would they be stuck with IE5.5 for Mac? What would they base Safari on, if there wasn't KHTML for KDE (which might not exist without gcc)? What if Apple couldn't make an independent phone / tablet with browser, would we all still be stuck with flash? No way to really know what would have happened, but it's a bit scary. (EDIT: I'm not a fan of Apple stuff due to their walled gardens, but I do recognize their role, along with Firefox, in saving us from an IE/flash internet and thus from a crazier Windows monoculture.)