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cowchase

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Awful. Who are the suits that are sabotaging Mozilla's core mission? Don't they understand that Mozillas Unique Selling Point is trust? Why the hell are they fumbling the ball?

This is a great concept. Getting rid of settings, add-ons and plugins for people that "just want their browser to work" is a good thing, especially when this is paired with good privacy defaults.

However, I see the auto suggestion features of the Awesome Bar at odds with the goal of protecting the user's privacy. This essentially means that all search terms that you enter into the search field will be sent to to all web services that were integrated by Mozilla, including Google, Yahoo, Microsoft, Bing, Wikipedia, Amazon etc.

Just imagine using the Awesome Bar to search your inbox for a (business) "proposal". Then, a little while later, your partner uses your laptop for online shopping and Amazon helpfully reminds him or her that you recently searched for "proposal". Depending on your relationship status, this could become very interesting...

Gmail messages must only be captured when they leave the Google network. They are the only provider to support server-to-server TLS

We should start lobbying for broader support for server-to-server TLS with perfect forward secrecy. While it alone is not sufficient to prevent the wiretapping of targeted individuals, it still makes fishing expeditions or "Big Data" level surveillance much harder. It would help keeping ordinary users' emails protected on the wire and secure the meta data of PGP emails.

An Experiment 13 years ago

I don't think they will be able to hold up to their promise to provide "a comprehensive analysis of (...) potential costs, timeframe, and technical challenges". A rate of $100 per hour leaves them only 15 minutes per project review. And then there would be no money left to implement the MVP of the selected project.

It's interesting to see major players beginning to compete on the level of privacy they offer to their users. "Personal information" has become one of the currencies on the web by which we "pay" for free services. Microsoft now seems to try a "low-cost" strategy to gain market share.

iCab Mobile had to remove the YouTube download function with the latest update:

Apple rejected the update. The reason was not the bugfix, they rejected the App because of a feature that was available for years in iCab Mobile and which is also available in hundreds of other Apps in the AppStore. They rejected the App because it is able to download videos from YouTube so you can watch the videos offline.