Opera: While there were times when Opera was a decent broswer (the pre-Mozilla Suite era), these days it can be a real pain to maintain support for Opera as it has the tendency to do the dodgiest things at the most unexpected times and the small userbase just doesn't motive many web developers to work around these problems, hence offering it as an alternative to IE6 maybe isn't a very good idea as a considerably large amount of pages are broken in Opera.

Safari: We're talking about IE6, so we have established that this is on Windows. Safari is a great browser but it's not a very great experience on Windows, the UI looks out-of-place, the fonts look weird (for users used to Windows font rendering), etc. I honestly don't think that it's a wise thing to suggest Safari for Windows users still using IE6, especially since the release of Google Chrome. (But I wouldn't hesitate to suggest it to anyone using OS X.)

one of the nice advantages of Chrome (well - or disadvantage if you are the IT administration) is that the installation is very likely to succeed even in corporate environments.

Chrome doesn't need administrative privileges to install and run.

So all these people stuck with IE6 in the office actually have a chance ad running a more modern browser if they download Chrome than any other browser.

Yeah. Firefox portable exists, but I can understand if they stick to the more "official" browsers.

Why would google advertise a competing browser? This is shown on the blank home page before your run a search query.

I did not search for anything, just went to the homepage.

So you tell me.

Clearly they need to put in a browser download choser so you can propperly select a browser you like. Obviously google is a monopoly and "google chrome" is too familiar a name, should be changed to something different.

</sarcasm>

On a side note I love almost everything about chrome. Eept that it's dom inspector can't deal with frames.