There is no way it is less than $100m. The Chrome team is at least the same size as the Firefox team, if not significantly larger. Google probably spent a good chunk of $100m on advertising Chrome; television spots and subway posters don't come cheap.

> There is no way it is less than $100m. The Chrome team is at least the same size as the Firefox team, if not significantly larger.

I would guess significantly larger. And Apple's WebKit engineer's efforts are also of value, making it effectively even larger.

> Google probably spent a good chunk of $100m on advertising Chrome; television spots and subway posters don't come cheap.

It's much more than that. Chrome is advertised pretty much everywhere online, and it has deals with lots of shareware software, where Chrome is installed along with for example Adobe Acrobat. The cost of all of these user acquisition strategies has to be way more than $100M.

Google is not losing $100M. They are making $REFERRAL_REVENUE - $100M, which is presumably >> $0.

Sure, but when you can get the same revenue for less money AND have your own browser which you can control AND are independent from a third party, it would be even better.

Err Chrome's global budget is several magnitudes higher than 100M.

I wouldn't be surprised if the dev alone would cost slightly over 100M. (And Mozilla runs the whole company on that, not just Firefox's dev)

Google spends way more than $100 million a year (estimates range from $500 million to $2 billion) on just advertising for Chrome.