365 days a year for several years Google has had a Chrome banner ad on www.google.com showing to Firefox users. That page is the most lucrative property on the web in terms of eyeballs, so take your most outrageous ad rate you can find and do the math. It's billions per year worth of advertising.

$1 billion is Apple's ad budget as of two years ago and a non-trivial fraction of Coke's overall annual ad budget. I call bs.

(http://www.asymco.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/11/Screen-Shot...)

> I'd like to see a source for the billion-dollar-a-year campaign

I can't find a source for the figure right now, unfortunately. And the whole thing is a guess, since Google doesn't release this information. All it releases is overall sales/marketing spending, which in 2012 was about $6 billion if I understand right (see <http://www.quora.com/How-much-does-Google-spend-on-advertisi...). That includes salaries for the marketing folks, etc, not just direct spending on campaigns.

As I recall, the $1b estimate broke down something like 30% actual spend (primetime TV ads, ads all over the London Tube, etc, etc) and 70% in-kind placement (i.e. "every search you do on Google with another browser shoves an ad for Chrome in your face"). I'll see if I can hunt down where I saw that...

> That's 3 times Mozilla's entire budget

Yep.

The "billion dollar" number is speculation, since the Google front page ad space that Chrome got isn't for sale to anyone else. "Priceless" would possibly be more accurate.

What do you think it would cost to put an Ad on the google homepage?

I mean the services Google provides to users in the form of web applications, yes. The terminology is sucky.

As for concrete examples, Hangouts only works in non-Chrome browsers (including ones with WebRTC support) if you install a Google-provided binary blob. Which you may not be able to do.

Gmail only supports offline access in Chrome (see https://support.google.com/mail/answer/6557?hl=en the "two exceptions" bit). Whether not having offline access to your mail counts as mail "not working" is up to you, I guess; for me it counts as "not working".

Various Google properties use UA sniffing to deliver degraded content to non-Chrome browsers. https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=921532#c9 is an example.

https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=973754 is an example where as far as I can tell they built the feature around non-standard Chrome-only functionality even though Firefox supports the standard version.

Google news menus don't work in standards-compliant browsers because they rely on a Chrome/WebKit bug. See https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1083932

Google patent search uses UA sniffing and locks out various browsers as a result. See https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1013702

Google Translate will fail to work in Firefox unless you have Flash installed (good luck on Mobile).... or spoof the Chrome UA string. See https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=976013

They do fix these bugs sometimes (the UA sniffing ones, where they just got the sniffing flat out wrong, tend to get fixed once someone diagnoses them). And sometimes not.

http://www.otsukare.info/2014/10/28/google-webcompatibility-... has a more complete rundown of the still-extant issues in case you're interested. The whole post is well worth reading, because it does say something important that needs to be said: there are many individuals at Google who believe in things like interoperability, web sites working in all browsers, etc, and strive for that (sometimes against internal opposition). It just happens that Google as an overall organization cares a lot more about its sites working in Chrome than it cares about them working in other browsers, with predictable results.

An example of this is Google Drive's offline mode, which only runs on Chrome (https://support.google.com/drive/answer/2375012?hl=en)