Bing and Firefox 30

Here's another tech. post. Sorry.

I have now switched to Bing as my search provider of choice. Why?

Google wants to know everything about me, you, and the other 7 billions of humans inhabiting this grossly overpopulated rock.

Firefox 30 now gets the nod as my default web browser. Why?

Google Chrome still doesn't really offer a way to set the cache at 5MB. That's where I have Firefox set. I would state that FF 30 loads pages faster as well, but I'm not currently well enough sighted to run the requisite tests to make that call. Yes, FF still uses egregious amounts of system RAM whilst running, but faithfully releases all those MB to the pool with the closure of the browser.

Google's newest version of their terms of use is appalling.

It's beginning to shape up as Google Services vs. Microsoft Bing Services for the soul of true computing.

I don't know what Apple is doing, as I still don't understand the appeal of tablets, and as for the iPhone, when it's $30 sans contact, I may give it a look. MP3 players are not worth more than 25USD. That's why I have two Sandisk Sansa Clip+s that I paid less than a combined 50USD. I picked up some 32GB micro-SD cards for 8USD ea., and I'm beholden to no xTunes bloatware and insane prices.

I am de-Amazoning as well. I buy less and less there, as other etailers commonly offer the products and services that I need and/or want for less cost.

The Mozilla Foundation is a great group of geeks. Microsoft now seems the lesser of all evils, and the earth still isn't round. A circle is round. The earth is perhaps best described as a slightly oblate spheroid...without getting all geometry happy.

The best thing that all this competition has done is offer you, me, us, wider choices of quality products from which to choose--and many are now, or will soon be--ostensibly free. Read those Privacy/Terms Of Use Statements.

Why am I still using Blogger? Now that, is a good question. I have written some decent blog scripts in Perl, but I can't see hosing a blog, and if I was to publish on my Comcast/Xfinity pages, my blog would have even less visibility than it does even now. That does seem more than a bit of a dodge. In fact, I do believe that it is. I can't fix all of my privacy ills in a day. There is no true anonymity on the 'Net. I really dislike this personality quirk. *shrugs*

That is all from the consumer end of my cave.