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 !