By the way isnt Mozilla like 90 percent financed by Google?
However, what if one day Google Chrome has 70%+ market share? Then the Chrome only creep will continue. You can already tell that they are doing a lot of Chrome only things on their web properties as with the nightly chrome builds you get occasional Google property only weird bugs. If Chrome had a massive market share they can then not have to bother supporting Mozilla or web standards. They can then leverage Chrome to have an advantage in performance and even monetization of Google products over others.
You can say right now Google has not done this, but they are doing small things here and there that are going down that route. Altruism is not a trait companies are known to keep for long, especially when there is no competition.
Oh, I agree with the tonality of the article, alright, but i don't subscribe in the "White Knight Firefox" story. Firefox is in bed with Google already, I don't like one bit what they did with the recent update and UI changes, and the performance of the browser in general is so bad it's not wonder people are switching to Chrome.
We need a much better competitor than Firefox if we want to fight against Chrome's domination.
...and they are competing on: Chrome<->Firefox Android<->Firefox OS
http://www.forbes.com/sites/timworstall/2013/01/22/so-why-is...
They actually get a bunch of Google search users from that deal and they don't pay a lot for the marketshare they got for it. If anything, Google wins with that deal.