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Comment by kisil_reboot | Hacker News Reader

This is baseless FUD; any serious objections he might have are only hinted at: "things I can't talk about". If everyone switched to Chrome, at worst Chrome would get complacent, as IE did, and at best, it would continue to be a great browser.

Use whatever browser you like best.

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> This is baseless FUD; any serious objections he might have are only hinted at: "things I can't talk about"

The author is Robert O'Callahan, who is a Distinguished Engineer at Mozilla and a 15-year veteran of browser development. He's not just some random blogger spouting off.

Being a distinguished engineer at Mozilla doesn't necessarily make one far more qualified to understand the vast array of potential implications of Google gaining monopoly power in a variety of web sectors.

No, but it might. I'm sure the author has spent vastly more time looking at web standards and trends than I have and as such, his opinion should carry more weight than your average person.

You've simply pulled out a variation on the old "correlation does not imply causation" retort.

No, I pulled a more wordy version of "that's an appeal to authority fallacy". And I believe my point still stands. The author is speaking of issues that are several orders of magnitude of complexity above "writing amazing web software at Mozilla" and also impacted by a variety of fields that are very different than software engineering. Thus he is only marginally more informed than your average HN user.

Being a distinguished engineer at Mozilla does make it more likely that there is something significant behind the "things I can't talk about".

It also gives him an ulterior motive. I am happy to hear what he has to say, but "just trust me" is not convincing.

To be clear, I am not accusing him of dishonesty, but I don't trust him to be impartial. People have a tendency to overvalue the thing they are working on.

Everyone switching to Chrome would give Google de-facto control of the web. "No company should control the web" is a valid objection.

It might be a little fud. But its also a little true. Google is becoming everything online. They even want to be your internet service provider some day. All that control in all aspects of the internet could be abused quite easily.

IE only got complacent because hundreds of millions of users switched to Firefox over the years, and then the same thing with Chrome. It took them almost a decade and 50% of market share to start caring about their browser again.

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