People are probably so up in arms about it because Google was taken to court over privacy issues in Buzz and the outcome of that was that Google agreed that they wouldn't make any future privacy misrepresentations.

I personally have my browsers set to block 3rd party and advertiser cookies so if some company were to put a cookie on my machine when I was trying my damnedest to not allow them to, well, that would make me a little miffed. The thing that gets me is all the companies doing this make me agree to a eula to use their site but when I ask them to obey the settings I've made on my machine they conveniently ignore them.

I won't say that tiobe has a very good method for getting their statistics... http://www.devtopics.com/most-popular-programming-languages/

How can you say that Java has no vulnerabilities? They've had a number of critical security updates which you hopefully didn't miss. You might want to read up on that .net cryptographic attack. The outcomes of it were that you could edit encrypted cookies and download any file in a sites directory and as you know, only a fool would trust the client and sites are supposed to serve files so also, only a fool would put critical information in any of those files in plaintext.

Those trendy features do save time and money. Or do you get paid by the line when you code?

I'm guessing from the number of crypto and imaging components that this is related to their recent JS math optimizations.

The only decent benchmark I've ever seen for browsers is something someone made which simply loaded local copies of sites like facebook to show how fast the browser really is at true "realistic workloads".

It always amazes me when reading Slashdot, which is so against software patents, that I see "Apple hasn't created anything" or "Apple stole everything they've ever made" statements time and time again. Can you imagine a world where we didn't use past ideas to further current ones?

To put it in a car analogy, think if the first person to build one had said to themselves, "Damn, if only I'd thought of the wheel!" Of course we'd have hover-cars so it wouldn't be so bad.