"That cookie is always broadcast in plain text every single time you click a link on any website. Right out in the open where anyone -- well, technically, anyone who happens to be on the same network as you and is in a position to view your network packets -- can just grab it out of the ether and immediately impersonate you on any website you are a member of." (emphasis mine) Very misleading. Jeff, i'm sure you understand how cookies really work, so i'll assume this is just poorly worded, but for the benefit of others reading: a single cookie will only ever be sent to a single domain, at most, and cannot be used to impersonate your identity on other websites.

I'm not surprised that Google, as a company, can innovate at the speed of lightning compared with the incredibly slow pace of the clunky old Microsoft. The former has grown up developing for the web, where updates can be released several times a day. The latter grew up writing shrink-wrapped software, released every three years or so. That puts Google's speed of iteration about one or two THOUSAND times greater than Microsoft's. Granted, those iterations include far, far smaller changes, but that's the whole point: small improvements done quickly are much, much better than big improvements done slowly since turns can be made so much more often.