Back in April Firefox made some big news because they were the first third-party program to ever be advertised on Google’s homepage. Now it appears that Google is trying to push Firefox 2 by promoting it once again. I’m not able to see this result in my version of Internet Explorer so I hope that this is real. I compare the two advertisements, the one from April and the one from this month, in the image above so that you can really see how much more prominent this one is.
All the top bar says is “Google recommends upgrading to the new, safer Firefox 2.0” and then they place an “Optimized for Google” logo on the left side along with a “Get It Now!” button on the right side. Since Google’s homepage is always slim and tidy it really makes the bar at the top stand out to visitors.
What I really want to know is how many Firefox users have actually converted thanks to Google. They also offer the referral buttons that you can put on your own website and Google will pay you $1 for any new people that you get to download and install the version of Firefox that comes with the Google Toolbar. So if Firefox has been downloaded around 270 million times (I assume that is solely Mozilla’s stats and does not include other download locations) then I would think that Google could do around 10 million downloads in a years time (including homepage advertising and referral buttons). Do you think my estimations are a little off?
News Source: Google Operating System
I think it’s bogus. It just happens that the Yahoo home page has an ad for IE 7 and it’s says Yahoo is “Optimized for IE 7″. It’s too similar in my opinion.
you been blocked on DIGG ???? too bad
Yahoo! displays exactly the same message on their home page, but it promotes IE7 instead of Firefox:
Safer? I doubt it.
Update: I don’t see the Firefox bar on Google either (I live in Belgium).
I do not have this bar. I checked both personalized homepage and regular hompage. Nothing.
Yes, we were blocked around two-months ago for being a “middle-man.” It was a little disappointing but there are still a lot of people that read the site so we weren’t too bothered by it.
For all of those people who thinks this might be bogus I found it interesting that the original source reporting this is a [blogs.zdnet.com] but they don’t say how they came across it.
Yeah I don’t see the ad anywhere on Google’s site when using IE.
What the heck, you mean to tell me GEICO owns DIGG?