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!