Not true. Install "Little Snitch" and you'll have full knowledge of what program is trying to call home. Anyway root access (or even user's password) is asked for only when installing something new, so even the dumbest Mac user will know when not to enter a password for an known program.

LOL!

Keep talking. This is useful skinny.

This is why endeavors like dataportability.com are important, because they put the control in the hands of the users, where the ownership of private data belongs in the first place.

Firefox gives me themes. Let's talk when Chrome offers them.

Firefox allows me to specify fonts and minimum font size for all websites.

And Firefox extensions actually make life comfortable:

1. PDF Download
2. Downthemall (increases download speeds up to 4 times, may not matter to most people but does significantly to many of us)
3. Web Developer Bar (nothing like this on ANY other browser)
4. FireBug (nothing like this on ANY other browser, not even Safari's inbuilt "Develop" menu options comes close for debugging)
5. Better Gmail
6. Better GReader (yes, not useful for common joes)
7. Tabmix Plus
8. Speed Dial
9. Foxmarks which makes sure all my bookmarks (and their keyboard shortcuts) are exactly the same in my office, on my three home machines (XP, Leopard, Ubuntu)

So, sure, you may find all this functionality "uninspiring" if your needs are simply to browse. You'll do just fine with ANY browser in that case, and you probably represent 80% of the browsing community -- but you're a small tip of that iceberg as you know what a browser option means. Most of that 80% doesn't know or care, they simply want to check their hotmail and read BBC. They're hardly going to be swayed away from IE for that precise reason. So for this group, Chrome is immaterial anyway.

To recap:

FOR GEEKS AND PEOPLE WHO KNOW:
Firefox or Opera, depending on whom you ask

FOR THOSE WHO REALLY WANT TO USE WEBKIT:
Safari will do, thank you

FOR THOSE WHO JUST WANT TO BROWSE:
Their platform's default browser will be it.

See, Chrome doesn't really make a dent in any of those camps.