I admire Firefox for what it's accomplished, but Chrome has stolen my heart. I had to use Firefox today actually to test something, and discovered a Bing bar that I'm pretty sure I didn't consent to, taking up valuable real-estate.

Whatever that bar is, it's not Mozilla official. Some other software on your computer put it there.

That very well may be, but my point was basically that it's not something I have to worry about in Chrome either.

You will, once the toolbar/adware/malware makers start targeting Chrome more. (Google can try to stop them, but it will be an arms race.)

It doesn't have bars really, only buttons that open floating views. Although I suppose you could inject a bar into the web page.

Technically, your operating system's security model allows this. There's little Firefox could do to prevent it.

This is a historical accident; only toy and mobile OSes have any sort of application-level access control.

There is work to give the user more control over this that unfortunately didn't make it into Firefox 4 [1], but ultimately it's a battle that can't be won; on the desktop, apps can modify other apps. I suspect that this will happen to Chrome too.

[1]: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=596343

Heck, since Chrome has to put itself into the users AppData folder in order to do silent updates, is there anything preventing malware from just screwing with the Chrome libraries themselves?

Even though you can't uninstall it, you can disable the extension on a per-user basis. Firefox looks in both per-user and system-wide locations to find installed addons. Only per-user addons can be removed by the user, in the addons dialog. System-wide extensions can be disabled per-user, but not uninstalled (disabling is almost the same thing). To uninstall a system-wide extension, hopfully the publisher has an unistall script, but worst-case, you can just delete the extension folder from the system-wide location. e.g. C:\Users\All Users\Mozilla\something on Windows.

It's an addon

It's not a question of Firefox allowing this -- if you run any program on your computer it'll have access to your data (and hence to your Firefox profile), and one of the principles behind Firefox is extensibility.

Chrome has taken the same approach Firefox did:

We can't prevent this from happening so we try to provide a good way for other software to do it, so they don't do it in terrible ways:

http://code.google.com/chrome/extensions/external_extensions...

My poor iPhone 3G...or maybe I should be happy since my phone got progressively less useful with every update. Very eager to see what iOS 5 has in store.

Agreed. Eager to see how well these work in the longterm.

That is super impressive. I would have never expected Microsoft would be able to breath new life into the 360 this late in the generation.

Angry Birds kind of reminds me of that old Artillery game on early Macs, which was really engaging with 2-people--if only Angry Birds had such.

At any rate, that game's success has been monumental and I am in awe of the creators.

It seems to me that Angry Birds is essentially a modernized re-imagining of the classic DOS game, Scorched Earth. Perhaps that's what you're remembering? I don't recall if there was a Mac release of Scorched Earth though.

The problem with these tech demos is exactly that--they're just tech. In-game graphics will never look this good because of non-cinematic camera angles, behind the shoulder viewpoint, and HUD elements mucking it up. It's nice looking, for sure, but I can get that from a Pixar movie.

They do suggest opportunities for low-cost CGI film-making.

This is very impressive, though I wonder how much of their success may be due to the significantly smaller amount of competing games on Android vs iOS?

That's exactly the point. Android is a more virgin market, so more potential there, especially for the tablet apps market. It turns out Scoble WAS right about Xoom and Honeycomb:

http://scobleizer.com/2011/03/04/developers-why-you-should-b...

The article offers the same theory. Big fish, small pond.

My best guess would be that's partially it. The other part being consumers are getter wiser when it comes to purchasing things. There's of flood of apps that lack polish and are quick cash-ins, and at this point the novelty of fart apps and what not has worn off.

Indeed, but I'm mixed on the change. I used to filled with the options while being able to see the webpage in the background, which I can no longer do (without pulling out the tab). But it's growing on me.

I agree, but Facebook doesn't really need to do it well to be successful, it just needs to be good enough, for better or worse.

True, it seems the YouTube convenience and instant gratification effect is at play here.