Interesting trend ...

First of all, they dropped Trillian out of the Google Pack (Gtalk's danger) and now they are denying Opera and other broswers ..

Now I KNOW Google owns 5% of AOL (which in turn owns Netscape), so maybe we'll see more of this ?

How can Firefox become a Google product? Isn't it open source software & thus of every one? Google can at most build it's own browser upon the open source code.

Although there is a great friendship between Google, Firefox & eachothers sponsors. Look at this Firefox page:
http://www.mozilla.com/add-ons/jogacompanion/

PS. The Joga add on is linked for on the frontpage of the Firefox home.

Art-One, if it's open source it doesn't mean that it can not become Google's ..

Or if it will be Google's (it might already be) it doesn't mean that it has to be official ..

Trust your instincts.

Googles strong involement could also be due to the fact that Firefox naturally is very flexible and customizable without alot of effort and experience. Google has had a history of starting great products in Firefox and then porting them to the more difficult (Gmail's the best example that I can think of)

Cristian: How can you own something that is open source? As it is from the community isn't it from every one?

You own the project itself, whilst you abide to the open-source definition :

http://www.opensource.org/docs/definition.php

You can never know what the future holds. Maybe Firefox will not be open-source anymore ..

Did you knew back in 97' what Google would be today ? I didn't. I used Altavista.

Maybe this will become a philosphical discussion. I don't think the present version of FF can be owned by Google.

Maybe a future version could be owned, but even then an other parallell version that evolved from present version could still be open source...

(A bit as what happened with the Netscape browser, I suppose...)

I do like opera, but try to write javascript for opera, it sucks!

I don't think Firefox will ever be a Google product (except that they might fork the source which anyone can do).

See this interview with Blake Ross (a Fx developer) in which he's really open about it:

"Q: There seems to be a good relationship between Google and Firefox. Where do you see that relationship going in the long run?

Ross: As far as the relationship goes, they've been an incredible partner for us. They featured Firefox on the Google home page for an entire day, which drives more traffic than we could get on our own in probably a year. Obviously, their motivations are clear – they see that IE7 is coming out; it has MSN Search integrated into its box; and this is kind of their play in the browser space."

"However, AdSense and AdWords are Opera friendly – [it’s] easy to know why"

Because they're several magnitudes simpler?

I don't think that Firefox will ever be a product of Google in its own right. More like something that Splasho suggested. They take a copy of the source code a make alterations (building what would be something like a Google version of Flock). Instead of Flickr it would integrate with Picasa. Instead of del.icio.us it would integrate with (presumably improved) Google Bookmarks etc.

With Google's huge audience they could release it as a seperate product, put it on their homepage and describe all the benefits of normal firefox + their additions. I am sure many people would be tempted.

Ooops. I forgot Google ALREADY did this. By packaging the Google Toolbar with Firefox and offering it for download. All they need to do now is improve the Firefox version of their toolbar to interact with their other services.

oh, I prefer quitting Google than Opera.. :)

dont you see the connection between Google and OpenSource?

A) – They use it from a long time ago to keep costs down (when they had to, but since it worked so well, move forward with it)

B) Since it is open source, they can make it act the way they want

C) and this is the shear brillance....they have hired countless (http://labs.google.com/why-google.html) open source lead developers. Why?? Not simply because they are talented, but it ensures the projects they want to keep alive stay alive. Additionally, they hire a couple of the leads, and they get multiples of coders (cough contributors) working for free. What better way is there?

So what about FF – its a HUGE piece of the battle against MS – it costs them little to get a lot. And not only from a MS dominance standpoint, but for the little default search option. If it goes to google.com, they get millions more in ad-sense revenue

people make everything Google out to be more than it is – take things at face value –

Opera probably has the worst javascript support of any of the four major browsers/rendering engines (IE/Gecko/Opera/KHTML). How many javascript-heavy or AJAX websites do you know work correctly with Opera?

As for the Anti-Opera conspiracy, remember that Google pays Opera every time a user searchs google using the built-in search bar (same with Firefox), which provides most of Opera's income (same with the Mozilla Organization). I think Google paying Opera is what influenced Opera to remove the ads on their free version.

waaait, you guys are reading WAY too much into this. Here's why google doesn't develop for opera, plain and simple:
http://calebegg.com/browserstats.png
Opera users can say all they want, they make up a tiny and shrinking piece of the browser pie. It would be more practical for google to develop for IE7 than opera.

[ via http://www.w3schools.com/browsers/browsers_stats.asp]

There stats are skewed. w3schools is worse than Alexa for stats because it's oriented towards (future) web developers.

Then if anything I would imagine it would be skewed towards Opera + Firefox and away from IE. The real percentage is probably lower. My point is, Opera users undeniably make up a small part of the google-tool-using deomographic.

So we should kill them, right? :(

Linux and Mac users are also few. But that doesn't mean they're not the most tech-savvy.

http://www.xpedient.hu/prg/images/Image/1217opera.jpg

Yahoo Mail Beta, for example, denies access for Opera, even if the browser could render the page (some Opera engineers say). Yahoo did the same with the new homepage. If you look at their code, you'll see it's full of stupid browser-testing conditions.

Caleb: You must take into account, that many opera users "hide" their opera and say that they are actually using IE because they would not get some pages displayed. So I think their (our) share might actually be higher.

Ionut: It is not only Yahoo Mail Beta. Flick is also part of the Yahoo universe and there are some features that are not available (or function poorly, just like google mail + calendar) with Opera. Most things work, but not everything.

Did not Albert Einstein say, this all is relatively? :-D My Startpage is tracked in Google Analytics. For 2006 it tells me the following:

Browser Percent
Internet Explorer| 52,1%
Firefox| 24,2%
Opera| 17,9%
Mozilla| 2,6%
Safari| 1,4%
Netscape| 1,0%
Konqueror| 0,5%
Mozilla Compatible Agent| 0,2%
Galeon| 0,1%
NoName | 0,1%

And by the way, did not the "Dark Side" say: Trust your instincts? ;-)

best regards, Thomas

sorry, I forgott to mention: GMail is completely useable with Opera (inclusive GMail Chat) if you set browser-identification (user agent string) to "mask as Mozilla". This is done in Opera 9 easy by "(right click)--page references--network".

My stats (from March -> today)
1. Firefox 59.95%
2. Internet Explorer 28.53%
3. Opera 5.02%
4. Safari 3.87%
5. Mozilla 1.25%

Does it really matter that it doesnt support some browsers? The products he's talking about there are in Beta, or even just Labs. The whole point of being in that stage is so they can eventually provide support for browsers like Opera.

That's just Google's way of working.

Google Analytics stats for my low visited site...
Internet Explorer 86,85%
Firefox 10,55%
Safari 1,47%
Mozilla 0,90%
Opera 0,17%
Netscape 0,06%

Philipp could YOU give us ur browser stats?

This is from back in November 2005, when I briefly tried Google Analytics:

- Internet Explorer 53.57%
- Firefox 38.00%
- Safari 3.75%
- Opera 2.44%
- Mozilla 1.09%
- Netscape 0.62%