I also heard that Firefox enjoys a major market share in Germany (a not-that-reliable source is http://www.quora.com/Why-is-Internet-Explorers-market-share-...). I even heard from a fellow German university student that "everyone [in Germany] uses Firefox" - obviously an exaggeration, but there must be some truth in it.
Anyone has an explanation (preferably backed by data) for the popularity of Mozilla software in Germany?
They also really like these 2-click-social-media-buttons, because it apparently gives better privacy (load the tracking/tweeting/liking script upon the click of a button, and when clicking again run the like/tweet function) http://www.heise.de/newsticker/meldung/Fuer-mehr-Datenschutz....
Which seems like security theatre to me. Why not just load the script on the first click, and then run the tweet function immediately after?
Because the tweet function invokes a pop-up window, which browsers won't allow unless attached to a click function.
> then run the tweet function immediately after?
The site should not be able to do so, because if that worked shady sites simply would trigger "like" or "tweet" for visitors to generate spam. Loading the original widget is the only way that is accepted by the social networks.
For example, they have more rules for Streetview. Also, German authorities were some of the first objectors to their wifi data collection:
http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2010/05/wifi-data-collection-...