Clark - 7:02 pm on Jan 27, 2005 (gmt 0)

Maybe Google hired the FF developers for a different reason. Adsense is the cash cow for Google. If by some wild stretch Firefox turns into 90% of the browser market within a year or two or five, (doubtful which I'll explain below), and the adblock extension becomes too popular, the adsense cow will stop producing milk. So hire the developers to come up with a system that will get around adblock? I doubt it, more likely, they are building a browser, will compete head to head with MS on the desktop. They want to be masters of their own future. I bet they will even partner with Hardware manufacturers and come up with PCs that surf the net, w/ their browser preinstalled, and no need to go near MS. By having their own browser, they can make sure no adblock will turn off their adsense ads. For them, a browser is imperative.

Coming back to the FF 90% browser share, people are missing a lot of points in this war. FF is an admirable effort. But it can't touch what MS can do if it wants to. IE has stopped being developed because a rich Internet threatens MS's cash cow. Windows&Office. But the day that Firefox does for the Internet what MS killed lo many years ago, you can bet that MS's team will come up with top features to beat FF. True, FF won't die since they are open source, but they will have a rough time keeping up.

MS will attempt to do what I'm suggesting that Google is working on.

You can bet that there are a lot of changes going to happen on the internet in the coming few years, with big Google vs MS war.

The fact that MS needs to kill innovation to keep the cash cow going, makes me think Google will "IBM" Microsoft. And the world turns around one more time.

(Is anyone still following?)