[Daniel14]

I can see two benefits of increasing Chrome market share for Google, that justify these expenses:

1) It speeds up the web. Since every second internet user makes Google money, making the web a great place for both consumers (speed, security) and developers (standards, up-to-date browsers) is very much in Google's interest. 2) It makes Google the default search engine. Instead of being at the mercy of browser developers and having to pay them huge sums of money, they can directly make lots of people use their search engine (and look at their ads).

I personally believe the second point is what actually finances the Chrome team. Like android, Chrome is but "moat" for Google, protecting their main source of revenue: Search. Shaking up the industry for the better is just a nice side effect.

[magicalist]

just to be chrome-defender guy again: whenever I've installed chrome it's always asked on first start what search engine I want to be the default.

I haven't installed from a bundle before, so that might different.

[sjwright]

I've always thought it was a clever move by Google.

1. You can't accuse Chrome of being a trojan horse for their search engine. 2. It makes Microsoft look bad when they default to Bing. 3. When asked, people almost always pick Google anyway. 4. Google now have (another) way of quantifying #3.

[georgefox]

Re: #4, I would imagine the percentage of Google Chrome users who would pick Google over an alternative would be a bit higher than the percentage for internet users overall.

[sjwright]

Agreed, but I'm sure the trend data would be useful for quantifying how their brand is tracking (not to mention how their competitors are tracking).

Plus I'm sure they can separate statistics based on whether they installed it directly, or whether it was installed as part of Skype, or whatever. The skype-installed user base would be somewhat closer to typical users.

[ZeroGravitas]

I seem to recall for a while (pre-Chrome) Google used to pay people a dollar if they got you to install Firefox with the Google Toolbar[1]. So I'm guessing having 20% of web surfers using Chrome is worth quite a lot to them.

1: http://tech.slashdot.org/story/05/11/05/1436226/Google-Payin...