Chrome is spyware. I use Konqueror.

There are like 5 clearly labeled checkboxes in the chrome options which turn off all of the "enhanced" features which report to google. If its really that big a deal, you can turn them off and not be stuck with a crappy browser like Konqueror.

Or just, you know, use Chromium.

How many damn times do people need telling? [blogspot.com]

There still isn't a fully functional equivalent of AdBlock Plus even. The best they can do is hope the download takes long enough that the script can kill it. You still register the HTTP request, no matter what.

Beyond that, all this Firefox hate is ridiculous.

"Beyond that, all this Firefox hate is ridiculous."

Is there hate? I have stopped using Firefox on a few different machines simply because it has experienced problems which were not replicated under Chrome... I'm not specifically avoiding any browser beyond IE, but won't be likely to switch back until Chrome begins to experience problems which are not replicated under Firefox.

"There still isn't a fully functional equivalent of AdBlock Plus even"
Yes there is... https://adblockplus.org/en/chrome [adblockplus.org]

Iron is for dumb paranoid fuckers who don't actually care about their own security [hybridsource.org]

TabMix Plus
AdBlock Plus
Ghostery
Better Privacy
ShareMeNot
NoScript
Greasemonkey
Lazarus
NitroPDF

The chromium world will need to cultivate as diverse and independent a community of developers for extensibility.

How many times do people need to read the follow-ups to that story to realize that it was wrong [piloseo.com]? Even Dan Sullivan who were central in driving the original story went back on this claim in a follow-up blog post after he learned more about it.

From the same page you referred to:

I still like Firefox and trust it more than Chrome... I see them both as flavors of the same candy (mmm delicious anti-IE candy), but after looking through the comments on this thread I definitely can see the hate wo which you refer.

Regarding your ad-block question... I honestly have no idea if it prevents downloads (yet!), but have learned that the HTTP request does still go through.So; there appear to be some disparities which lead me to wonder why it would bear the adblock name.

Thanks for giving me a couple of things to wonder about. I'd just assumed that adblock would be adblock under any iteration... and it's not.

I've never had to close any recent version of Firefox because it consumed multiple gigabytes of memory.

Moreover, Firefox has a sweet tab grouping user interface that is very useful for people keeping many open tabs, that is for those who would suffer more from poor memory management in the browser, and I can't find an equivalent in Chrome.

Does anyone know where the money they get from Google goes?

Anyone who can read, use the web, and cares probably does, since they publish their audited financial statement on their website.

Aren't they a non-profit that's freely distributing a community-developed piece of software?

From the information in the report cited below, they are a non-profit "that exists to provide organizational, legal, and financial support for the Mozilla open-source software project", and whose "purpose is to develop open source, standards compliant, free Internet applications that will be useable free of charge to tens of millions of users" and "to develop foundational technologies that will be used by content and software developers to develop standards compliant online content and open source internet software."

That's what their financial statements from 2009 (latest available from their website) talk about: 10 people and ~ $1.5M in budget.

The latest financial statement available on their website is the consoldiated report for 2010 on 2009 [mozilla.com]. And it has, for 2010 (2009 in parens) $123M ($104M) in revenue and $87M ($61M) in expenses, $63M ($40M) of which is software development, $12M ($13M) of which is general and administrative expense, $10M ($7M) of which is branding and marketing, and $2M ($1M) of which is program services (all figures rounded to the nearest million.)

I have no idea where you got the $1.5M in 2009 budget from.

But $100M??? Assuming an average salary of $100K, that's 1000 people.

First, they don't have $100M in expenses, they have $123M in revenue and only $87M in expenses. Expenses include things besides just personnel costs, and personnel costs themselves include more than just salary (if you estimated personnel costs as twice salary, you'd be a lot closer than if you estimated, as you have, at the salary itself.)

Or are they really spending as much as Nike and Coke on marketing?

Unless Nike and Coke spend $10M or less per year on marketing, no.

It is still possible to get most of the old UI back in Firefox. This is what I do:

• Turn all of the toolbars on
• Turn off "Tabs on Top" to put the tabs back where they belong
• Add a Firefox 3 theme [game-point.net]
• Install a real status bar [mozilla.org]
• Restore the back/forward button functionality [mozilla.org]

It's not quite the same, but it's close.

Other than it gets bogged down the longer you use it. After a few days of use, it uses 1.5 GB of RAM for 5 pages and pegs the CPU every 10 seconds for like 5 seconds. You can't even type while it's doing whatever it's going. Basically, the developers of FF care only about shiny new features and care nothing about making a stable and decent browser. (And yes, I run without Flash.) FF is a bloated piece of crap. Safari crashes under Windows every other day. Chrome is really the only decent free browser available under Windows.