Is the author seriously advertising google chrome as a safe way to download software ? The very browser known to exist to increase the reach of google surveillance of what people do on the web doesn't seem to possibly be part of a solution here.

Those who give up privacy expecting to gain download safety will lose both.

Of course they do. Unless google is not in charge of the ranking algorithm behind their web search engine.

The search algorithm is not the only tool in the ranking as we know google has a way to penalize a specific website among others.

save yourself some potential issues and use getfirefox.com

Unfortunately, they would just search that as well. And if the machine is already infested, it's a conduit search at that.

The problem is Windows. IE is too easy to hack and break. Drive-by exploits are routine with IE and Windows-Firefox. There is little security and process limitation in Windows to prevent an active expoit. Worse yet, I cant even delete an "open file" without special tools. In any other OS, that's not a problem. File gets removed. Windows acts like a toddler.

BTW, Xubuntu works well here for friends and family whom I support. It just works, they're nigh invulnerable to exploits and problems are a kill and rm away.