Even without this bug it's a stretch to think that Google would want to bury Firefox. Google has a vested interest in Firefox's success. That's why they pay Mozilla 300 million a year.
I'm not on the side of thinking Google are doing anything malicious here, but worth pointing out that their paying Firefox money doesn't mean they wouldn't neccesarily want to see Firefox die.
They pay that money not as a charitable donation but because the deal makes them more in advertising than it costs. From a monetary point of view, of course it would be better for them if all that advertising came from Chrome, so they still make the money but they don't have to pay $300m because they already own the browser.
I found this quite funny. I actually hear similar arguments from iOS developers quiet frequently with regard to Android. They've gotten lazy and think that designing flexible layouts that work on multiple screen resolutions is a challenge that they shouldn't have to solve.
Don't get me wrong fragmentation of versions & hardware is making some tasks difficult for Android devs but I feel like some devs are regressing in their mentality towards software challenges thanks to iOS.
It's not just about screen resolutions. It's also about higher support costs due largely to the 50MB limit for Android apps, which apparently causes issues for some users, and lower proportion of paying customers due to implementation issues with Google Play/Android Market. I linked the piece by Mika Mobile that this sarcastic piece is in response to below, but here it is again, with much more detail of some of the major issues with the Android platform:
This really appears to be for Android 4.0+. Google's core apps follow these guidelines but Android 2.3 down seems to be left behind.
I'm not sure as an Android developer I'm ready to leave those users behind just yet which means a lot of extra work maintaining 2 different sets of UI code. The action bar is the killer.
I keep hearing the same story of how most people meet their co-founder "x and y met in school".
I'm a few years out of university and have moved around a lot. Most of my trusted friends now days are non technical which makes my candidate pool near empty. I agree completely that getting on board with someone you don't know well is a bad idea.
It seems to me that all the rules placed around how you must have a team to get funded is restricting startups to the realm of college/uni students and there's probably a lot of opportunities being missed.
"I agree completely that getting on board with someone you don't know well is a bad idea."
Eh I kind of disagree about this.
I ended up working on a project through a friend of a friend. A guy was doing some work on his own and needed some pro-bono help for his project. We have very different personalities but our skills complemented one another perfectly. We ended up moving out to the Bay Area together to work on our own projects. A year later, we've meshed extremely well given some tough circumstances.
There's absolutely no way we would've met back in Uni, as we frequented different circles.
Thanks for your feedback. I do believe however, even if some clicks are just not for "honest interest", the extra exposure would still have a value to the advertiser.
Also many companies do place value on appearing socially responsible.
Few people click and it's mostly poor, uneducated customers. Your customers will be cheap-ass direct response marketers that can't compute a confidence interval.
Click-based attribution is fundamentally broken, and the market is moving away from that. Haven't you done any customer development with marketers!?
There would be an indicator on the ad to show it's an AdGives ad. Also the user would see how much was donated and who to on there way through to the advertisers site.
Down the line I envisage it growing to allow the user to direct the money from their impression + more..
Also, it will be run as either a non-for-profit or with a small profit from impressions (depending on what interests investors). We would still collect some percentage of impressions either way to pay for costs.
http://www.zdnet.com/blog/btl/google-paying-mozilla-300-mill...