Google Promotes Firefox on Homepage

Google has been putting up the Google Toolbar ad on the homepage for a while now, but apparently yesterday they put up an ad that said “Firefox with Google Toolbar: tabbed browsing, safer surfing” that was accompanied by a picture of the Google Toolbar installed on Firefox. The interesting bit is that this ad was only viewed by those using IE in the US. We tried from here on google.com as well as the Indian google.co.in, but we got the plain ad-free homepage. Google’s promotion of Firefox over IE isn’t anything new - since last year, they’ve been paying AdSense web publishers $1 via every time someone visits their site to download Firefox and switch over. So an ad for the Google Toolbar with a screenshot of Firefox doesn’t seem like such a big thing, but the entire web seems to be pretty kicked about it. Oh, well. An even more interesting bit is that I’m posting this using Opera!