Good question. by “civic” i meant the sense of citizenship, participation in the public commons that defines us. By “social” i meant something broader, in the sense that plenty of things that bring economic value don’t bring social value; for example lots of things are bought and sold (thus creating economic value) but cause disease and thus aren’t so good for social values.

Vlad re Chrome: I expect to see some interesting ideas from Google — it’s full of smart people. Firefox didn’t spread by money or buying distribution channels. It’s hard to get millions of people to want a new browser. Google has some advantages — everyone pays attention to what they do. On the other hand, a lot of people are worried about Google and many not want their browser to come from Google. Once the original excitement over Chrome fades a bit we’ll get more reasoned reviews of things like performance and so on.

And what about Chrome, Mitchell?

I think your post deserves more visibility, so I have translated into French and posted it on my blog. See http://standblog.org/blog/post/2008/09/05/Mozilla-Firefox-et-Google-Chrome . (I had a hard time translating “where individual human benefit, social benefit, and civic benefit are the most important things” because of the subtlety of nuance between “Social” and “civic”. If you could elaborate on this, please do!

Geez, it is so difficult to try and summarize all of the good and bad points of Google Chrome’s impact on Mozilla, Firefox, and on the Internet in general without making people hit their heads on their keyboards as they fall into a deep sleep.

There’s no doubt that comparisons will need to be made and plans laid out because Google’s actions whatever they are and may be will have a direct affect on nearly every person who uses the Internet with the exception of those who always thought that Google was their browser all along, but even the question of whether or not Google’s Chrome will be the death of Firefox is absolutely absurd.

Imagine being Mark Surman who’s first official duty it is to declare that Mozilla will be closing up shop and that Google will be accepting applications from all former MoCo and MoFo employees who would like a high paying and rewarding career in maintaining the tire pressure of Google employee’s Segway PTs.

Have some faith will ya?
Mozilla will be fine, Firefox will be fine, we’ll all be fine.

Believe it or not there are enough Internet users to go around and as one company may be a bit more dominant than others, the other competing companies are usually not doing so bad themselves. Just take a look at the cola wars, fast food chains, car companies and so on.

And finally, and if I remember correctly, Internet Explorer is the one to keep our focus on.
If anything, the presence of Google’s Chrome is another great example and point for the open source over proprietary argument and movement, and I certainly don’t have any problem with Google dumping a few million dollars into marketing Chrome to IE users.
It will be highly unlikely that the greater majority of Firefox users will migrate to Chrome and leave Firefox behind. Firefox users, contributors, and volunteers are loyal, passionate, and certainly not afraid of some competition, after all, they’ve been taking IE head on for some time now and I still see IE’s dominance as the target, not Google’s who just entered the game yesterday.

There, now will you be able to sleep better tonight?