Well, once you get past the tech savvy crowd which is like 1% of the browsing population, even if Firefox truly beats Chrome by a big margin, I don't think this is going to change things one bit for Firefox.
Chrome is bundled with Java, Acrobat and Flash updates, which ~98% of computers in the world have. Forget a checkbox in a hurry because you want to do something useful and Chrome is installed.
It is bundled with many PCs by the OEMs who get paid for it.
It is constantly advertised on TV and on Google properties like Google search engine and Youtube, especially to Opera and IE users.
Mozilla doesn't have the resources to do the above and,all this explains Chromes' growth among the nontech crowd more than just performance differences.
I have personally seen many folks who I installed Firefox back in the day end up using Chrome. When I ask them, most of the time they don't have no idea how they got it. Google's been sinking a lot of money into Chrome over the years(even paying websites $1 per download they drive) and it makes sense because one more Chrome install they don't have to pay money to Firefox and Opera for being the default search for another user.
In at least four cases, Barksdale spied on minors' Google accounts without their consent, according to a source close to the incidents. In an incident this spring involving a 15-year-old boy who he'd befriended, Barksdale tapped into call logs from Google Voice, Google's Internet phone service, after the boy refused to tell him the name of his new girlfriend, according to our source. After accessing the kid's account to retrieve her name and phone number, Barksdale then taunted the boy and threatened to call her.
In other cases involving teens of both sexes, Barksdale exhibited a similar pattern of aggressively violating others' privacy, according to our source. He accessed contact lists and chat transcripts, and in one case quoted from an IM that he'd looked up behind the person's back. (He later apologized to one for retrieving the information without her knowledge.) In another incident, Barksdale unblocked himself from a Gtalk buddy list even though the teen in question had taken steps to cut communications with the Google engineer.
Some of those keywords are worth tens of dollars per click so no wonder,the colors have been A/B optmized to get the most clicks from people not knowing they are ads.
Not to say that Bing, Yahoo etc. are much better but I expect more from the "Do No Evil" Google rather than increasing the next quarter's earnings instead of targeting older people and people with bad monitors and hurting people who did a lot of good work to come in the first few in organic results but don't and/or can't pay Google for expensive ads. Also, Bing and the rest continue to mostly lose money and they can't afford to separate ads while the big guy continues to reduce the difference between ads and search results.
Would be interesting to see how IE11 fares since it's close to release. Also sad to see one less engine because of Operas' Presto being retired because of things like this.
Meanwhile millions of businesses are able to get it to work quite well. Ever use StackOverflow? NewEgg? Their server and tools revenue continues to increase by double digits. You think that's all media manipulation? Go search Dice for for the number of openings.
Just because someone was not able use the right tool for the right job in your instance doesn't prove anything. One of my friends used Windows Server to stream popular sports and got so much traffic that he got shutdown by Dish.
I thought it was yet another of those articles with an inflammatory but ultimately misleading headline designed to get on Buzzfeed and Reddit. Boy, was I wrong. The story was actually worse than the headline.
What's to stop individuals or companies from using the same tech to collect data? After all, what you do in public is public, and private detectives are allowed to follow and film their targets in public to show their clients and use in court.
I doubt even the EU will act against the only meager competition to Google's absolute dominance. Not to mention that devices with Google as default are the majority these days because of iOS, Android on phones and tablets with declining PC sales. Bing is only default in IE which in nullified in EU because of the browser ballot, Google pays off Mozilla and some OEMs to have it as the default.
I sincerely wish there were better ways of expressing ideas than memegenerated images that seems to be infecting almost every forum I read. Take a look at http://reddit.com/r/gaming All the posts are image macros or comics. One might think that only images were allowed there, but memes seem to be honey to garner upvotes and have killed all other content on that particular subreddit.
Serious question, who would you blame for that? The government for the high tax rate? Or the companies for not including VAT into the advertized price?
How is the Kinect any worse than every phone, tablet, laptop that have cameras and/or mics, which people carry with them 24/7, even to showers? For example, I would be much more embarassed by someone posting the video and voice feed from my phone on the internet than from my living room.
Slashdot's moderation system is much better in this regard. The users starting score for new posts first goes to 0 and then -1 so that the comment will be collapsed by default reducing visibility but they can still accrue upvotes and karma allowing the users starting score to recover instead of turning the site into a zombie town where the zombies don't know they're dead.
Its sad that it took so long spite of being all over HN, Reddit, /. Etc.
Shows that the tech community is not as big as we think and/or is apathetic to even filling a form, forget about peaceful marches. This is why politicians don't care and don't need to care about things that are important to only the tech crowd.
The numbers are just not there. There are lots of posts, tens of thousands of comments, even more up votes, but when the rubber meets the road, there is nothing. And the people with lots of money in the tech field don't care to part some for social change or to form PAC. We have no one else to blame for this but ourselves for things like the Aarons case and the state of affairs. Politicians have zero reasons to care one bit when a simple online petition can't make 100k votes all over the US in 2 weeks of non stop and over the top coverage in tech circles and going viral.
It is bundled with many PCs by the OEMs who get paid for it.
It is constantly advertised on TV and on Google properties like Google search engine and Youtube, especially to Opera and IE users.
Mozilla doesn't have the resources to do the above and,all this explains Chromes' growth among the nontech crowd more than just performance differences.
I have personally seen many folks who I installed Firefox back in the day end up using Chrome. When I ask them, most of the time they don't have no idea how they got it. Google's been sinking a lot of money into Chrome over the years(even paying websites $1 per download they drive) and it makes sense because one more Chrome install they don't have to pay money to Firefox and Opera for being the default search for another user.