What browser?

I got an email from a customer and believe my reply might be of interest to many people. The customer quoted an article from another blog(?) that recommended to search directly out of the URL field. Here is my reply verbatim as I sent it:

The crux with all these "easy" tips is that they all play right into the industry's game.

The more searches any given search engine gets to perform the more money they can ask for their aggregated info on what we search for. The search engine companies may not directly advertise to us but the companies that buy this aggregated search information can then advertise better and more directly to us.

• It's a fact that Bing and Yahoo (they use Bing) do NOT show us what in the search results are paid advertisements.
• It's a fact that way too many advertisements get abused to get malicious programs on our computers.
• It's a fact that some web browsers (like IE and Edge, both from Microsoft!) make it very difficult or don't allow us at all to suppress advertisements.
• It's a fact that Google does not allow us to suppress certain advertisements in Google's own Chrome browser.

All the before said and more is behind my STRONG recommendation to use only Firefox as I set it up for my customers.

And I urge my customers to search ONLY out of the little browser specific Search window:

because when you search from there you get a Google search result

MINUS any advertisement(s),
PLUS the red, yellow and green Web of Trust ratings right by every search result.
AND your search with Google has happened anonymously!

Update Jan. 10th 2017:
Sadly around November 5th 2016 Mozilla, the organization that supplies Firefox and Google have removed that piece of code from their download pages; some details are here.
If you remove the WOT extension or add-on from your Firefox browser it currently can not be re-installed!
Google recently made the WOT extension available again.

If that is not reason enough for any of my customers it's their decision and their money if I have to clean up their machine again.

 Stay safe!