Firefox Session at Cloud Expo

Mozilla has been going toe to toe with Microsoft on the browser front standing solidly behind the European Union‘s stance against the software giant over monopoly abuse for tying the Internet Explorer browser to the Windows operating system.

Mozilla, is also rapidly digging a hole in Internet Explorer‘s dominating market share.

So it just does not make any sense that Mozilla would now promote Microsoft for anything. Or does it?

It has been widely reported today that Mozilla's Director of Community Development Asa Dotzler stated in his personal blog that Microsoft does a better job to Google when it comes to protecting end user privacy. He even went so far as to recommend that users take to Bing in lieu of Google.

The post is a reaction to a video from Google Chief Executive Officer Eric Schmidt who said in an interview with MSNBC regarding online privacy:

If you have something that you don't want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn't be doing it in the first place. If you really need that kind of privacy, the reality is that search engines -- including Google -- do retain this information for some time and it's important, for example, that we are all subject in the United States to the Patriot Act and it is possible that all that information could be made available to the authorities.

Google has always been Mozilla's sugar daddy and earns almost 90% of its revenue from Firefox' use of Google as default home page and revenues from ad placements. This works out very well for Mozilla as Yahoo and Microsoft have cozied up on their search deal. For Google , backing Mozilla has been advantageous in it's battle against Microsoft.But ever since Google came out with its home grown browser Chrome last year , there has been speculation about the future of this relationship. Seems like there is some rocky road ahead with  Dotzler's criticisms of the Google CEO's comments running amuck on the web. These are some of Dotzler's concerns:

"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. Watch the video," Dotzler stated. "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.)". "I think that the thing that bothers me most about Google CEO Eric Schmidt's comment is that it makes clear that he simply doesn't understand privacy. 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," Dotzler added.

Google released beta versions of its Chrome web browser for the Apple Mac and Linux platforms this month. With Google concentrating on showcasing chrome and with Mozilla-Google deal expiring in November 2011, the question on everyone's mind is whether or not it will be renewed. Maybe Dotzler knows something that we don't?