Firefox Creator No Longer Trusts Google?

[HardOCP News]

Blake Ross, one of the guys behind Firefox, says that he no longer trusts Google after the company announced that it will promote its own products over everyone else.

Call me naive: I think you can make a lot of money, go public, even monopolize a market, and still retain a moral compass that points in the direction of Google’s stated top priority—users. But Google lost me today:

 

[nigerian_businessman]

I don't see the big deal, and here's why.

Firefox promotes itself as the safest browser available and touts it's security as one of its selling points when in fact in recent years it has been attacked with more exploits than IE, and neither Firefox or IE come close to being as secure as Opera. Sure, they fix the exploits when they're found and disclose information, if you can find it buried in their website, but on the front page of Firefox.com, it says "Firefox continues to lead the way in online security, and now includes active protection from online scams to keep you safer."

Yet it's been proven by independant studies that Firefox isn't leading anything:.

Firefox has more exploits according to Secunia. In fact, Firefox 2.x has an unpatched exploit, while both Opera 9.x and IE 7.x have none. If you ask me, that sounds more like trailing the competition than leading it.

Here are links for comparison:
Opera 9.x - Opera 8.x - Firefox 1.x - Firefox 2.x - IE 6.x - IE 7.x

So who is being dishonest? Google has an obligation to it's employees and its shareholders to be as successful as possible. Giving promotion to it's own products isn't dishonest, it's good business. They still offer links to competitiors, and if you don't bother looking at the suggestions and ads and just read the search results, the most popular site still comes out on top. So where is the problem? Why is it dishonest, or untrustworthy, or otherwise wrong for Google to try and make money? And how is this somehow worse than touting yourself as being the most secure when in fact you are the least?

 

[wfalcon]

No offense (and a bit off topic), but does anyone else find a "Nigerian businessman" talking about dishonesty funny?

 

[Team Obi Juan]

I don't see the big deal, and here's why.

Firefox promotes itself as the safest browser available and touts it's security as one of its selling points when in fact in recent years it has been attacked with more exploits than IE, and neither Firefox or IE come close to being as secure as Opera. Sure, they fix the exploits when they're found and disclose information, if you can find it buried in their website, but on the front page of Firefox.com, it says "Firefox continues to lead the way in online security, and now includes active protection from online scams to keep you safer."

Yet it's been proven by independant studies that Firefox isn't leading anything:.

Firefox has more exploits according to Secunia. In fact, Firefox 2.x has an unpatched exploit, while both Opera 9.x and IE 7.x have none. If you ask me, that sounds more like trailing the competition than leading it.

Here are links for comparison:
Opera 9.x - Opera 8.x - Firefox 1.x - Firefox 2.x - IE 6.x - IE 7.x

So who is being dishonest? Google has an obligation to it's employees and its shareholders to be as successful as possible. Giving promotion to it's own products isn't dishonest, it's good business. They still offer links to competitiors, and if you don't bother looking at the suggestions and ads and just read the search results, the most popular site still comes out on top. So where is the problem? Why is it dishonest, or untrustworthy, or otherwise wrong for Google to try and make money? And how is this somehow worse than touting yourself as being the most secure when in fact you are the least?

Dude you're just mad that FF is stopping all your emails to me trying to get me to take your country's money.

IE7 fo life!

 

[Grentz]

Gotta say, IE7 has been running better for me than Firefox....

Only thing that I use firefox for is looking at links that do not always look safe (sometimes posted on boards and stuff) since I have NoScript on firefox which makes it very safe...but that is an unfair comparison to IE or Opera as NoScript is a 3rd party addon and block EVERYTHING

 

[Babbster]

Here's what I see as the fundamental here: He's complaining that a company is advertising their own products on their own website. That's just a dumb thing to complain about. Add on the fact that they're not doing anything like making people look at an ad for Google services before they get their search results (at most, it seems to be a one-liner right before the results) AND that other paid advertisers still get their ads to appear first. Do a search of "photo sharing" and witness the magic that Google's one-line ad for Picasa is actually 4th in line behind paid advertisements, and that Picasa isn't even in the first page of search results - something I'm sure Google could "fix" if they wanted to).

I should note the above information about advertisers appearing before Google's little "tip/ad" is only true for the first search on the term. On subsequent searches, the "tip" does appear right at the top. I would still ask, though, what's the harm and where's the evil? One of the benefits of having people come to your website - be you Google or [H]ardOCP - is that you get to tell people about your products and services. If Google was some kind of public utility I'd see the problem, but it's a business trying to make money. As a longtime Google user, I'm certainly not suffering when Google decides to hype one of their services when I make a search, anymore than I suffered when I used Yahoo! way back when and they did the same thing. I still get my searches and they still look kosher to me.