Healthy market requires healthy competition, but this was not the competition we had in mind. Mozilla's community development head, Asa Dotzler, recently commented on his blog on Google's and Microsoft's search engines, and said how Bing has a better privacy policy.

The comments are basically a reply to Google's recent comments on privacy, shared by Google's CEO Eric Schmidt in an interview with CNBC. He commented on the subject of privacy, advising people that if they want privacy they simply shouldn't do the thing that's supposed to stay private (Must have taken a slew of engineers to figure that one out sub.ed). He pointed out how search engines, Google included, retain information for some time and underlined the fact that the US has Patriot Act, which allows for information to be available to the authorities if required – something still deemed by many as the first step to the Big Brother scenario.

Asa Dotzler, however, turned to full offensive mode it seems, as his blog post features a transcript of a part of Mr. Schmidt's interview followed by "That was Eric Schmidt, the CEO of Google, telling you exactly what he thinks about your privacy. There is no ambiguity, no "out of context" here. ... And here's how you can easily switch Firefox's search from Google to Bing. (Yes, Bing does have a better privacy policy than Google.)" The link on the add-on that lets you switch from Google to Bing as the default search engine obviously speaks a thousand words. OK, not thousand but these three should apparently do - don't use Google.

On the other hand, we don’t see anything wise in biting the hands that feeds you, as Mozilla and Google signed a deal that ends in 2011, from which Mozilla gets "the vast bulk of its revenue".

More here.