What he actually says is: "[...]if you care about your privacy, remember that Bing is better than Google, at least in that department."

In the blog post http://weblogs.mozillazine.org/asa/archives/2009/12/if_you_h... all he says about the matter is:

> And here's how you can easily switch Firefox's search from Google to Bing. (Yes, Bing does have a better privacy policy than Google.)

Asa says in the comments that "Microsoft doesn't connect it to my name, my addressbook, my friends, my email address, my physical location, etc. Microsoft scrubs things like IP address immediately and stores the data for less time."

But the Bing privacy policy specifically says that it does store IP addresses. The only reference to scrubbing IP addresses is that they do so when they hand off their search data to 3rd parties (um, thanks), or after 18 months (just as long as Google). The bit about not linking those searches to the rest of your account info is also specious - the privacy policy only says it stores search terms separate from information that 'directly identifies' a user, but it doesn't say or imply that IP addresses are considered direct identification, and it specifically says that it stores the cookie id associated with the search terms.

Because last I checked Mozilla gets nearly all of it's revenue from Google.

If they have a better deal with Bing, then it's in Mozilla's interest to push users away from Google towards Bing anyway...

It seems that the Mozilla corporation was quite satisfied in its leading position in the special olympics race that has typified web browser development (Netscape under AOL failed so hard they killed their own once dominant brand, Mozilla took years to achieve reasonable quality, Microsoft is still putting out versions of IE competitive to the browser market in about 1999, Opera is a permanent bit-player, and Apple loathes the idea of writing a decent version of any of its software products that runs on windows). Now that there's some honest to goodness competition (in speed, usability, robustness, standards compliance, cutting edge standards adoption, and security) it's nothing but whine, whine, whine.

Dear Mozilla, stop whining, Firefox is an excellent browser, keep the effort going to make it even better and you won't have to worry about what big-bad-Google is doing because it won't matter.

Google developed Chrome because, for some reason, they thought that there's just _not enough_ "Google Advertising" online already, and they wanted to make sure that people can't easily disable advertisements, tracking cookies, etc. I tried Chrome on Linux, and really . . . was not that impressed. Firefox revolutionized the "tabbed browsing" concept, and that's the main fancy feature of Chrome. In a way, Chrome kinda just stole all the great things about Firefox (things that have taken years to develop), put those things into a shiny blue curvy-cornered UI, and slapped the Google name on it.

  > Firefox revolutionized the "tabbed browsing" concept,
  > ... Chrome kinda just stole all the great things about
  > Firefox (things that have taken years to develop)

Tabbed browsing wouldn't be a popular if it was only in Opera.

Reusing open source code from another open source project is not "stealing". This is very much in line with the spirit of open source.

Recently, someone did the unthinkable: they published their own version of Dive Into Python and got it listed on Amazon.com. This apparently caused a small firestorm within Apress, the exact details of which I am not privy to, but which (I am told) became a somewhat larger firestorm after the Apress executives realized they had no legal recourse, and asked my opinion on the matter. You see, the book is published under the GNU Free Documentation License, which explicitly gives anyone and everyone the right to publish it themselves. (I was about to write “gives third parties the right,” until I realized that there are no third parties because there are no second parties. That’s kind of the point.)

http://diveintomark.org/archives/2009/10/19/the-point

It uses CSS to hide the ad. Chrome doesn't expose the necessary hooks to do ad blocking the way FF does.

The chrome ad blocker is easily circumvented.

And honestly, process-per-tab, a proper security model, and plugins running as a separate process so the buggy Flash plugin doesn't bring down your browser are things that Firefox is considering copying from Chrome, not the other way around.

No, they realized that the Mozilla project could not be bent to Google's whims, so they took their ball and went home. Mozilla has quite a healthy development community and welcomes outside contributors.

Eric Schmidt said in an interview about chromeOS that google's goal is to improve user experience on the Internet as a whole; google's revenues are directly correlateable with total hours spent on the Internet. If you look at google's efforts from that point of view, they don't seem quite so scary ;)

  Maybe Google plans to implement the missing stuff later,
  maybe they’re still trying to figure out whether it can be
  done without enabling effective ad blocking, but in the
  meanwhile the pale AdBlock and FlashBlock imitations which
  have been hacked together by overwhelming popular demand, are
  forced to use a very fragile CSS-based hiding approach,
  ridiculously easy to circumvent.

Check out this musing from Aza Raskin (http://www.azarask.in/blog/post/identity-in-the-browser-fire...):

Your identity is too important to be owned by any one company. Your friends are too important to be owned by any one company. A Solution

The browser is your personal and trusted agent to the web. It’s the only actor on the Internet stage which both knows everything you do on the web, and never has to let that data leave the privacy of your desktop. Your browser knows you (or, at least, should).

So if Google goes into the Operating System realm, too, people will have real reason to worry; it'll be even easier for it (Google) to erase those lines between public and private data. And it all starts in the browser. If Microsoft didn't illustrate this, I don't know what did.

Maybe Firefox should counter-move and develop its own search engine.

To Google's credit, they've open sourced some of the work they've done (GWT, Chrome, Chrome OS, etc.) so in theory there's a pressure relief valve there. One of the great boons of open source is that it does provide that pressure valve so that people have alternatives if mainstream software becomes too oppressive (though this is a side benefit, a lot of OSS is as good as or better than the commercial alternatives).

It's really a shame that nobody has yet figured out how to compete fully with Google. There have been a lot of attempts, but there is still such a huge gap that's it's somewhat disheartening. Google revolutionized server management, data center management, and web application development nearly a decade ago and nobody has really caught up to them on all counts yet. I'm not sure whether that's a testament to their genius or to the sad state of the rest of the industry, but it looks like it's likely to be a controlling factor in the nature of the internet for some time to come.

I don't see any difference in handling of tracking cookies between chromium and firefox. Both offer very limited cookie handling really.

And as for cookie handling, XPCom is a delightfully complete API. It's a platform. Chrome isn't nearly there yet. And there's not much evidence that they want to be.

There's absolutely nothing wrong with stealing features from a competitor, that's how progress is made. Chrome is not some sort of anti-consumer "forced ad consumption" monstrosity that you seem to make it out to be. By every measure it very much seems to be an attempt by Google to raise the bar for web browsers. Key indicators of this being: they have leveraged existing open source software (webkit); have put a lot of effort into standards compliance, javascript performance (v8), and forward looking standards adoption (html5 and css 3 features, web sockets, etc.); a drastically open development process (even more so than firefox, with much easier access to dev builds); an incredibly fast development pace (Chrome is barely 1 year old); and have made the vast majority of their work open source with the Chromium project. To every indication they want to prove what can be done with browsers and very much hope other browsers copy them.

If you look at Chrome and all you see is yet-another-tabbed-browser then I question whether or not Hacker News is the correct community for you to hang out in.

Not pointing any fingers (cough Microsoft cough Apple cough) but the problem that most people have with 'copying features' is when the copier tries to claim that it was their 'innovation' or that they've got some claim to fame because they 'copied it better.'

They took a rendering engine, made some changes to allow tabs to be run as their own process, and took a year to implement an underwhelming and feature-sparse extension system.

What is the big achievement? Mozilla created their own rendering engine. And I don't think that's a bad thing. I think we'd be worse off in a world where the sole choices are Trident and WebKit.

I think at this stage the best solution would be forking Firefox. Remember when they forked out Phoenix from Mozilla to create a lightweight and fast browser that offers features that users actually want? I think it's time to do it again.

The audio/video tag situation is messy, but I hardly think solely blaming Mozilla for it is fair. Apple won't support Ogg because of submarine patent concerns (although I doubt them already having a license and having millions of devices with H.264 hardware support hurt) and Mozilla won't support H.264 due to known patent concerns. It's hardly the overdramatic "abuse of market position" that you make it out to be, especially given that their intentions are also somewhat altruistic.

I also don't see what a Firefox fork would achieve. I doubt anyone is going to magically be able to make Firefox faster if Mozilla's full-time staff is unable to, and I doubt ignoring patents or doing messy hacks to integrate OS codec support is going to win widespread favour given the current position of the video/audio tag.

Maybe, maybe not. It depends where their priorities are. Firefox still has memory leaks that need to be plugged, etc. If Mozilla staff is divided between fixing memory leaks and adding features, then a group solely focused on memory leaks might have a better chance.

Also, I personally haven't been exposed to any evidence regarding the existence of memory leaks in a Firefox install with no extensions. Many people have anecdotal evidence of their issues with memory leaks, but I never see a corresponding claim for having no extensions installed.

Of course that point is also anecdotal.

Also, isn't FF3.5 faster now than it ever was, even as Firebird or Phoenix?

As far as forking FF: good luck. The code is a bit of a mess and there's a huge amount of it. What organization will want to take this on? I think you would have better chances at cloning WebKit+V8.

But, one of the things I always hated about Microsoft is the way they compete with others that use their ecosystem of platforms and tools ... Mozilla is formed of ex-Netscape people and they remember quite well what that kind of competition can do.

Netscape was a good browser, and indeed they waited 3 years before they released 6.0 ... but god dammit, how can you compete with a browser that's bundled with everyone's operating system, and for free too.

When you have a parter that helps you bring in more revenue (like Mozilla) you try not to screw-up that relationship. If other competing browsers or Web/Web-enabled applications appear in the future, what will be their incentive to use Google's services ... if Google has a history of competing directly with you sooner or later?

It's the same thing over and over again ... groundhog day?

First, bundling the browser with the OS was absolutely the right thing to do, there's no greater indication of this than that every single modern operating system comes with a bundled web browser. MS may have been guilty of a lot of other anti-competitive activity, but decrying the bundling of the browser with the OS is just silly and naive.

Second, people seem to misremember just how crappy Netscape was then. Netscape 4.x was a travesty, it was buggy, slow, and crash-prone. IE 4 really was a better browser at the time (honest). People complain about the problems of supporting IE6 today but supporting NS 4 was so much worse. Not only was it far less standards compliant than IE at the time (if you could imagine it) but simple things like using an external style sheet could cause the browser to crash reliably. We know now that much of these quality problems were due to AOL mismanagement and a completely unnecessary full rewrite of the browser core, nevertheless, such was the state of browsers at the time.

Fortuitously, MS woke up to the importance of the web, started putting real effort into IE development, bundled the browser with the OS, and used a few other dirty tricks at just the right time when Netscape was floundering. IE dominated the market shortly thereafter, but such a dramatic change in marketshare was possible only because Netscape was not a serious competitor at the time. Netscape development continued to flounder until eventually they just gave up and decided, like SCO, to pursue their futures in court rather than in the marketplace. They gained a partial victory in court but it was utterly meaningless as they had lost to such an astronomical degree in the market they had no hope at that point. They dumped the mess of code they had on the open source community which spent several years working on it before it was even remotely worthwhile, and they ran, eventually completely killing their entire brand (an impressive achievement).

Now we see, though, that quality browsers like FF, Chrome (and to a lesser extent Safari and Opera) can and do compete against a bundled browser like IE. IE is still losing marketshare while FF, Chrome, and others continue to build it, over time this will add up and IE may yet be dethroned in the near future despite all the purported insurmountable advantages of OS bundling. I suspect that these trends will only accelerate, as the tech-leaders of today shun IE as their personal browser and IE is very far behind in supporting not only the web standards of today (e.g. css 2) but the quickly approaching standards of tomorrow (css 3/html 5/ws/etc.) When you can make nice looking boxes with rounded corners and drop shadows that work for FF, Chrome, and Safari users with 5 seconds of work by adding 2 lines to a css definition then the cost/benefit differential for supporting different browsers starts to change dramatically, with IE very much not on the winning end of that equation.

The difference you're missing is the difference between "the browser" and "a web browser". Best scenario: operating system comes with more than one, and the operating system doesn't try to force the user to default to any particular one.

What Microsoft did that was (in a sense) "evil genius" was that it managed to brainwash 85 percent of its users into thinking that "Internet Explorer" was the only way to get onto the Internet.

I was teaching a PHP primer class (primer, since it was composed mostly of non-technical people) at Hacker Dojo, and one of the students was like "what do you mean by web browser?". Seems we still have a little bit of ignorance to overcome.

It's also interesting you say that Microsoft managed to rename the web "Internet Explorer" because in Tim Berners-Lee's book he says that after Mosaic was launched and was beginning to become popular the people behind Netscape were trying to rename the web themselves and he wasn't very happy about that.

Again, I think bundling is a side note, people concentrate on it because of quirks of the law which made it a cornerstone of the anti-trust case against MS. The real reason MS won the browser war was because they pushed when Netscape was most vulnerable. The simple fact is that the change in marketshare from NS to IE during the browser war is too great to be accounted for entirely by anything that doesn't include lots and lots of active NS users consciously switching to IE. That doesn't fit the narrative of the unjustly wronged spunky little david (coughAOLcough) going up against the evil goliath, but that's the way it happened.

MS has plenty to answer for but the extended period of IE browser dominance is as much due to Netscape/AOL's massive mistakes as it is to Microsoft's cunning.

I'm not one of those people, but the end-result of the Browser Wars, was that once Microsoft won they spent less.. and less.. and less.. resources on Internet Explorer. The entire goal of Internet Explorer was to defeat Netscape so that Netscape Communicator wouldn't overtake Windows as the place to run applications. Bill Gates has openly decried the idea of the browser becoming the operating system (though I don't know about recently).

So Microsoft made a great product, but in the process set back the development of web browsers by years (since their goal -- as I see it -- was to eliminate the competition so that they could steer the market into stagnation).

Netscape certainly dropped the ball, but MS didn't with the browser wars on merit alone.

Edit: s/with/win