In the beginning, there was Netscape and its Navigator — perhaps not exactly the beginning, but close enough. Then came Microsoft and Internet Explorer, launching the first browser war, and eventually, the death of Netscape and a massive anti-trust trial for Microsoft. IE has retained the market dominance it gained by Netscape's downfall to the present day.

There are challenges to the market leader, however — serious challengers, particularly Mozilla's Firefox, which has steadily gained against IE over the past five years. Like the mythical son who avenges his father, Firefox — a descendant of the Netscape codebase — appears to have finally won at least a symbolic victory, as Firefox 3.5 has overtaken Internet Explorer 7 as the world's most popular browser.

Nobody wants to find out his or her house is full of bugs, and that goes for software developers and their digital homes as well. The way each responds says a lot about how they feel about others, whether that means hiding the bugs under the rug, behind proprietary code, or actually taking the time to squash them. Unfortunately, dedicated squashing means admitting there are bugs to squash, something that is way too easy to take out of context.

Google has enormous reach already, and is reaching further into people's online experience. It's little wonder, then, that people would like to be reassured that Google plans to respect their privacy. Google CEO Eric Schmidt's recent comments on privacy are doing the opposite.

On a CNBC special, Schmidt says "If you have something that you don't want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn't be doing it in the first place." He goes on to advise that -- as users should know -- search engines retain information that users should be wary of. Not surprisingly, the response has not gone over well with the open source community that tends to value privacy very highly.