It's no coincidence that the day after Google launched a huge advertising campaign to get people using Chrome, a senior figure at Mozilla has urged people to switch their search to Bing. The problem with fighting battles on many fronts is that everyone wants a pop at you and Google need to be careful not to make too many enemies and find themselves surrounded.
The privacy issue has become a big problem. Eric Schmidt's suggestion that "If you have something that you don't want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn't be doing it in the first place" probably wasn't particularly helpful in front of a pack of web users who are already anxious after recent Facebook changes.
The simple fact is, if Google's real time web is to work, they need as much information as possible to add to the mix but I'm not sure they're going about extracting it the right way. There seems to be a very sneaky approach around the issue (changing settings on Facebook to block search engines was very well hidden and had very limited publicity).
Whilst Mozilla are of course fighting their own battle, the statement "that a company with so much user data on its servers is led by someone who just doesn't understand privacy is really scary to me and it should be scary to you as well" may not be completely wide of the mark. But the key here is Google have made themselves another enemy, and they seem to be piling up rather rapidly.
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