But really I feel like people jump to the antiauthoritarian rhetoric really quickly nowadays. I know your making a joke, but damn if I'm not worried we're kind of normalizing the concept
Google's has been bashed so consistently on privacy issues on mainstream media that non-techies often associate them with creepy data collection.
Microsoft hasn't been in the news as much, at least not regarding privacy matters. They're often seen by the public as the solid company behind trusted products like Office and Windows.
You're proving my point. The sources you linked are the eff, a techie's personal blog, arstechnica, and forbes. With the exception of forbes they're all tech niches.
Now look at mainstream media. CNN alone has 230K results for google privacy [0]. How many results for microsoft privacy? 16k [1]
You're being intentionally obtuse. Google is a search engine product and a company. Microsoft is just a company. It stands to reason more people would search for the former.
> Google's has been bashed so consistently on privacy issues on mainstream media that non-techies often associate them with creepy data collection
What? Every non-tech person I see is happily running Google Chrome and has never even considered Firefox. Hell, I think most still think Google is one of the "good guys".
Non-tech people still trust Google much more than Microsoft. Microsoft is bad, but they haven't made your data their core business just yet.
There is nothing interesting or crazy about my statement. Microsoft sells software and services and has done so for the past 35 years. They started getting interested in people data recently but it is not their CORE business. How is this controversial?
HN is on the fore-front of this Google bashing. Just look at this comment on another HN thread about "buy now, pay later". Here's the comment [1] which justifies MS actions:
> Maintaining browsers has become a significant undertaking, so complex that only well-funded corporate interests can afford to keep one patched and up-to-date with the latest web standards. It surpassed operating system complexity. It surpassed pretty much everything else too.
So we can forget about it ever being truly "free" (and free from ads) unless we simplify the web somehow. I also don't think we're going to go back in time and start cutting features out of browsers. So that isn't going to happen
Google develops Chromium and Google gets constantly bashed for selling ads. MS modifies Chromium and adds their own branding and sell ads. MS is just trying to cover their development cost.
These are multi billion dollar companies that siphon money from all sorts of avenues powered by people’s ability to use the web. It is in their interest to develop these browsers. But they don’t have to syphon even more money from people by doing so. I don’t agree with your assessment.
The definition of trust that security professionals use is that A trusts B if B has some way to do something bad to A. A can stop trusting B by taking steps to eliminate the ability of B to harm A.
So, the statement "Microsoft Edge runs on the same technology as Chrome, with the added trust of Microsoft" actually means "Microsoft Edge runs on the same technology as Chrome, with the added ability for Microsoft to screw you over".
Someone in their marketing run a survey of which brand is more trusted and they are playing on that card. The question would be did the survey cover both consumers and enterprise users as I think the answers to these would be different.
They named their user tracking, telemetry, and "Buy Now, Pay Later" add-ons "trust"? That's really Orwellian.