Not sure I like the adversarial title, but it's great that the changes are going over well. Firefox does a lot to better the entire ecosystem that is the Web, and I'm super glad they're around.
Also generally my first move when I install FF on a new machine is to switch out the default search provider so... This doesn't affect me too much
Just to counterbalance- I really like the adversarial title. I'm not the biggest fan of Google the company, and Firefox distancing themselves from them makes me happy.
Just to add even more counterbalance, I consider both Google and Mozilla enemies of public discourse on the internet.
What I'm referring to is the fact that turning the web into a platform on which a wide variety of applications can run makes it more complicated and consequently more failure-prone and more tedious to use the web to publish and to read text, images and links to other pages of text and images.
I don't in isolation mind the creation of a new application-delivery platform (and I appreciate the fact that the new application-delivery platform is not the intellectual property of a single corporation). I just wish there were some way to tell publishers of text, images and links to other pages of text and images to switch from the new application-delivery platform to something else, something whose design is not a compromise between the needs of the application-delivery platform and the needs of publishers and readers of text, images and links to other pages of text and images.
Documents work better when they are mere data as opposed to programs requiring or assuming a complicated execution environment. HTML documents were better than PostScript and MS-Word documents for this reason -- until JavaScript was added to HTML, and web pages became programs assuming an execution environment, and then that execution environment got more and more complicated.
And to add to that, it's just a freakin title, adversarial or not. The title simply states fact that one company no longer needs another companies revenue, why can't it be left at that? I like all titles, regardless (link bait, trolls, flames, truth, false bias....whatever, it's all good and the best stand on their own merit)!
Unfortunately this posturing is not because of any independence in Mozilla or any new revenue generating ability. Instead, they've just to switched to Yahoo/Bing's side now.
Also generally my first move when I install FF on a new machine is to switch out the default search provider so... This doesn't affect me too much