Google Chrome -- A new browser and my conspiratorial anti-capitalist fears

from www.webware.com:

Mozilla CEO John Lilly on Tuesday waxed philosophical about the release of Google's new Web browser, Chrome, despite it signaling an attempt by the search giant--and Mozilla's major financier--to become its biggest competitor.
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Mozilla and Google have had a long and very fruitful relationship. Google is the default search engine on the Mozilla Firefox browser, and the company pays Mozilla large sums for the privilege: $56 million of the $66 million that Mozilla Corp. made in 2006.

But Lilly, writing in his blog, said he welcomed the competition posed by Google. Lilly said Mozilla would continue its financial relationship with Google until 2011 and would continue to work with the search giant on technical collaborations such as crash reports system Breakpad.

Paul Kim, vice president of marketing for Mozilla, said that Google staff would be allowed to continue to contribute to the Mozilla Foundation's projects. "As a 100 percent open-source project, we welcome contributions to Firefox from everyone," he said.

I think it's quite possible what we are looking at here, from a business standpoint, is google covering its bases in the way that only a giant corporation with money to burn can. Recently we heard that google and mozilla agreed to continue for the time being their business arrangement where google massively funds firefox and firefox makes google the default search engine in the firefox browser.

It seems plausible that what google is doing with Chrome is basically saying to firefox: we have an alternative browser we can market and spend the money on.  i.e. they are covering their bases -- their goal is to dominate the search space so they make their advertising money -- if that means buying their way into the top browser then they will do that, but what if firefox demands too much money or changes their mind and decides to use a different search engine as their default (they can't really change search engines even if they wanted to now because they need the google money).

Chrome may be the shot across the bow from google warning firefox not to think about trying to mess with having google as the default search engine.  So basically my guess is google won't push/market the new browser too hard as long as firefox stays in line..

But the threat will be that if firefox ever tries to stop partnering with google then google will go all out against firefox.

If true it's not exactly happy news. Or maybe i am just being paranoid and conspiratorial.