Why on earth would Google want to sponsor the Mozilla Foundation !?
My guess is that they want to encourage remaining Firefox users to switch to their Chrome browser (and ultimately to their Chrome OS). To do this, they must make Firefox look and behave as much like Chrome as possible. Once they have done this, they can then shut down Firefox (or halt development as they have already done with the Thunderbird e-mail client). Their goal is to grab as much of the cloud-based thin-client (handset and tablet) world-wide market as they can. Remember that they own both the Android and Chrome operating systems.
The real prize is users' data. Google want to have as much of the world population's data on their data centres as possible where they can sift it and analyse it to their heart's content. They have already stated quite blatantly that are analysing users' G-mail messages for commercial purposes and will continue to do so. Microsoft and Apple are also going after the cloud-based thin-client market segment although Microsoft has been slow getting off the starting block. Both companies are probably too ethical to monetize their users' data but they will quite happily make it available to the NSA.
China is desperately playing catch-up so that their own people's data doesn't reside on data centres in the USA. I am not sure what Russia is doing but it will need to be something similar if they don't want to lose their own people's data in the same way. India and the Arab states also need to wake up and smell the coffee.
'Sir, please,' she said... 'Will you not share your wisdom with us?'
'I have no wisdom,' he told her.
'Your experiences, then?'
'They have been trivial, uninteresting, and full of error.'
Ian M. Banks - Feersum Endjinn
Edited by micksharpe (Wed 30-Apr-14 17:46:24)