[nnethercote]

> This is baseless FUD; any serious objections he might have are only hinted at: "things I can't talk about"

The author is Robert O'Callahan, who is a Distinguished Engineer at Mozilla and a 15-year veteran of browser development. He's not just some random blogger spouting off.

[dwaltrip]

Being a distinguished engineer at Mozilla doesn't necessarily make one far more qualified to understand the vast array of potential implications of Google gaining monopoly power in a variety of web sectors.

[2muchcoffeeman]

No, but it might. I'm sure the author has spent vastly more time looking at web standards and trends than I have and as such, his opinion should carry more weight than your average person.

You've simply pulled out a variation on the old "correlation does not imply causation" retort.

[dwaltrip]

No, I pulled a more wordy version of "that's an appeal to authority fallacy". And I believe my point still stands. The author is speaking of issues that are several orders of magnitude of complexity above "writing amazing web software at Mozilla" and also impacted by a variety of fields that are very different than software engineering. Thus he is only marginally more informed than your average HN user.

[nnethercote]

Being a distinguished engineer at Mozilla does make it more likely that there is something significant behind the "things I can't talk about".

[seanflyon]

It also gives him an ulterior motive. I am happy to hear what he has to say, but "just trust me" is not convincing.

To be clear, I am not accusing him of dishonesty, but I don't trust him to be impartial. People have a tendency to overvalue the thing they are working on.