FIREFOX a new surveillance ploy?

Point being?

I can't think of any reason they would need to do that; Microsoft has been part-and-parcel to the system for a long time.  Search out my post a month or so ago which linked to an in-depth analysis of Windows XP as an government intelligence tool.   Internet Explorer is part of the system.   

To the best of my understanding, Firefox is an open-source web browser. This means that the source code is available for all to view.  This is not to say that there aren't many ways your browser security could still be compromised, but as far as security goes I can't see much comparison to IE.   

If the gov't is interested in you, they're watching your internet connection itself, not your browser.  And if they want more  details they can surely install keystroke loggers, get screen snapshots, etc., all remotely and without you knowing about it.  Your web browser would be the least of your worries.

This statement indicates to me that you're not quite sure what you're talking about.  Firefox includes a built-in search bar that allows for quick searches of some of the most popular websites such as Google, Yahoo!, Amazon, etc.   Google is there at the top because just about every web-savvy person USES IT. 

I say you have things backwards, here, Tom Paine.   While there may be no privacy online, Firefox is still a far better choice overall.

TP, no problem.  I always feel a bit apprehensive when I post something correcting someone else has said, because I'm always trying to think ahead of myself and make sure I'M not the one who's got it backwards, or who is confused.  It's a complicated world out there!   Anyway I think the major point here is probably not which browser is better, but that as a whole privacy is dead anyway.  I personally use a hardware router/firewall, antivirus, run both Adaware and Spybot regularly, keep updated with all the latest patches, and I still know that I'm not secure.  But I try to do what I can.  I really need to get back to running Linux full-time.  Maybe once I get this new PC up and running ...

Anyway speaking of browsers, another neat (and commercial) alternative is Opera.  It's very nice as well and handles e-mail as well.   If Firefox and Thunderbird weren't out there I'd probably be using it right now.  Also a big step up from IE in terms of usability.

In the very beginning it used to be called Phoenix (because it was born from the "ashes" of Mozilla; Mozilla is an alive project as well, but many considered that browser too bloated and thus "dead"). Legal reasons forced that to be renamed to Firebird. I am not certain wether changing the name to Firefox was for legal reasons too, or because it sounded too much like Thunderbird (the e-mail program).

Anyway, on the matter of Google being the default search engine in Firefox, I don't think anything of that. It is the most commonly used search engine and thus a logical default setting. Firefox supports search plugins for many search engines and sites (http://mycroft.mozdev.org/download.html).

On the matter of the Department of Homeland Security, not everyone working there is an evil metamorphing lizard from outer space. Some people just (naively) work there because they think they are doing a good thing, they think they are protecting the American people. Their main reason to recommend Firefox was probably the amount of security holes in Internet Explorer, making it able for "cyber-terrorists" to construct large networks that can be used to send gargantuan amounts of data to a single server (DDoS-attack). From a controlling-the-people perspective, it is way more complicated to do that via an open-source project, than via a commercial business which secret arrangements can be made with (cf. DRM, Digital Rights Management, to combat privacy, oh, I meant piracy).