I would call it a credible option, not a threat. It's the solution for many threats, actually. But Mercury News wrote the headline, so . . .
Would Firefox be a more credible threat if you had the ability to search the web by just asking for any information with a question in plain English and had results returned based on the meaning of what's asked and the context in which it is asked?
You put this on Firefox's home page and have a special search button on the tool bar to take you to "Search." After all, according to Robert X. Cringely (author of Accidental Empires and the PBS TV special "Revenge of the Nerds"), the search function is the Internet!. See http://www.pbs.org/cringely/pulpit/pulpit20040422.html.
The search button can take you back to Firefox's home page (which because of the prominence of Google's logo and query box, I call it the search page), which would have the Google icon and another box called Firefox Context Search (or something like that).
Would this make Firefox miles ahead of Microsoft? Years ahead of Yahoo!?
Your thoughts, please...