Mozilla isn't positioned to stand up to Google while they're getting $300 million a year [0] from them. (For reference Mozilla's 2011 revenue was $163M [1]) I trust (to a point) their motivations but I would imagine that much dough comes with more strings attached than just making Google the default search in Firefox.
I think we're very lucky to have Mozilla in the FOSS world but the will for better privacy will have to come from the community.
You are right. Google silently removed 3 (that i counted) times the ability to remove referrer from chrom[e|ium]
And apple probably disabled some 3rd party cookies more to harm google than thinking on user privacy (now this is speculation, but add that the fact that jobs had said he'd gone nuclear on google at the time)
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Mozilla isn't positioned to stand up to Google while they're getting $300 million a year [0] from them. (For reference Mozilla's 2011 revenue was $163M [1]) I trust (to a point) their motivations but I would imagine that much dough comes with more strings attached than just making Google the default search in Firefox.
I think we're very lucky to have Mozilla in the FOSS world but the will for better privacy will have to come from the community.
[0] - http://www.forbes.com/sites/timworstall/2013/01/22/so-why-is...
[1] - http://www.mozilla.org/en-US/foundation/annualreport/2011/fa...
edit: I didn't state it explicitly but my argument is based on the idea that Google is primarily interested in a low-privacy and ad-based web.
You are right. Google silently removed 3 (that i counted) times the ability to remove referrer from chrom[e|ium]
And apple probably disabled some 3rd party cookies more to harm google than thinking on user privacy (now this is speculation, but add that the fact that jobs had said he'd gone nuclear on google at the time)