Now that's true Firefox today is sustained by Google's money primarily (but I'm sure it would be fine with Bing's money - its all about money for corporations, and Firefox still has a large user base).
I also doubt they hate Firefox. But Chrome's advertisement budget alone is 20 times higher than what they pay to Firefox. That's quite a bit.
Certainly there are interests in Firefox's demise for Chrome (and for IE). You'll notice IE's marketing study was _exactly_ the same at Chrome's one.
Put IE on top, Chrome behind (it would be make the study looks too fake if they're all put too low and Chrome is the cool kid right now), then Firefox last, and no one cares for Opera, Safari, etc.
Why? Because it has nothing to do with technical details. It has everything to do with advertisement (or FUD, like we called it back in the days.)
This. There's an actual documentary about it: "Code Rush" http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u404SLJj7ig
I'll just say your mention of FUD is ironic since last I checked, Mozilla's income from the google search referral contract was something like $80 million, which would make 20x that number $1.6 billion. I'd love to see your source on that one.
You also clearly didn't bother to actually read any of the report. There are in fact serious security issues brought up there, have been brought up before [1], and are an active and interesting area of research. Mozilla and the other browser vendors are actively working on the issues brought up there (for instance, [2]), which no one has solved completely.
But yes, please. Let's reduce this to soap opera and sound bites.
[1] http://www.matasano.com/research/jit/ [2] http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3337727