Privacy - New Weapons in the New Browser War

Privacy - New Weapons in the New Browser War

It looks like 2010 did not have a good start for members of the browser market. With Google threatening to leave the Chinese market, and Microsoft facing an outburst of bad publicity with the flaws from IE, the overall browser market seems quite unbalanced right now and the outcome might mean the end of some web browsers.

After the organized and highly sophisticated cyber attacks on several western companies that were Chinese based, Google reported that flaws in older versions of IE had facilitated the theft of intellectual property from these companies, including Google. As such, after all the bad publicity and the major PR disaster for Microsoft, European countries, namely Germany followed by France, have publicly advised people not to use Internet Explorer anymore. What else can you do when the very government advises people against your own product?

This was quite a blow for Microsoft, and they are still trying to recover. On the other hand, Google has refused to continue to censor its search results in China, claiming that it will soon pull out altogether from China, meaning Google.cn and all Google products like the Android phones. How much of a loss is this for Google? Some say not much, since the Android platform is not widely adopted in China, and it would have been homebrewed anyway.

Meanwhile, Firefox is busy launching its 3.6 version, reaching a 32% of the market share for web browsers, and leaving Chrome to gather about 4% in just a couple of months. Chrome has managed to receive a great deal of positive reviews that acclaimed the browser for its speed, and effectiveness. Even if IE still leads in the market share with 58%, Microsoft is struggling to convince people to upgrade to their latest version, IE8, claiming that this one is more secure, and that anything else except IE, can be much more threatening to users browsing the web.

On top of this, user privacy on the web might be a thing of the past. Facebook CEO, Mark Zuckerberg, states that content posted online and allowed to be viewed is not private. Meaning that, if users do not carefully set their privacy settings to a close viewing circle, or better if they don't post anything that they want to be kept private, everything else belongs to the web. As such, users who share photos of themselves can not expect others to ignore them, or worse, not use them or publish them somewhere else against their will.

Privacy has to be viewed in both ways. It can not be presumed to be something guaranteed solely by the security measures of web browsers, or antiviruses, but it also has to be something ensured by users themselves. If we are to survive the browsers' war we have to protect our information and virtual identities, not only relying on security provided by the browsers, but also keep in mind that everything we post on social networks is no longer our sole property.

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