In practice, they have the Google home page to promote it...which is perhaps the only thing that can make a dent against something like IE which comes with the OS.

It will likely affect Mozilla, though for the moment it doesn't look like it, since they have extended their partnership for 3 more years. http://news.cnet.com/8301-1023_3-10028096-93.html .Though it will be interesting what will happen in that time.

totally disagree. the day will come very soon when you will be able to run heavy apps like Google Earth in Chrome - and we all know that you will NEVER be able to do that in Explorer.

Now, maybe Google Earth is not enough to make people switch, but 1 Internet user in 5 is already using Firefox with no marketing budget and no branding (vs Google being the #1brand in the world)

And if Google Earth is not enough, what about porn with no buffering? :)