They have a presentation about what's coming in HTML5 at a Google dev con and you are surprised they didn't go to the effort to make it work in browsers that, at the time, may not have even supported these features?
They do it to Opera as well. Pretty much trying to bully out anyone they can in browsers. I get annoyed at their excessive "try Chrome" popups on websites as well. I don't care what browser anyone uses, but trying to push one's browser as the "one and only true faith" on every major service they provide is annoying.
With everything having full acid compliance and keeping up with modern day features, there's very few reasons not to support the most current browsers out there, especially when you're a company as large as google. Granted this site is using things like filesystem API[1] that only Webkit has so far I believe so it kind of comes down to "showing off the bleeding edge" in this case.
Huh? Google is not doing charity by paying Mozilla, the GP is off base there; they have a contract with Mozilla for getting to be the default search provider. There's nothing to threaten with. But maybe you're privy to some secret contract negotiations the rest of the world isn't?
Besides, there's a reason Google pays so much for that slot: there are others willing to pay a lot for it as well, and even more competitors if Mozilla is willing to take a smaller payment for it.
