That is like saying Brendan Eich is beholden to Mozilla because they currently pay him. Don't forget the fact that he could get a job in less than a minute's worth of effort at pretty much any tech company in the world. Mozilla's traffic has a value that is independent of Google.

I had to look that up just to verify it was that much. 300M is a boatload of money per year.

http://allthingsd.com/20111222/google-will-pay-mozilla-almos...

Yes, and I suspect that Firefox is, at least, not going to work against the way it makes its money (ads) but the alternative browsers have bigger conflicts of interest.

Opera?

Plus with their switch to Blink on the horizon, even the old complaints about rendering compatibility are soon to be moot.

> Duh! Chrome, Youtube, Maps, Android and virtually everything serve Google's $$$$ making efforts.

Following the above logic wouldn't Opera not fit the bill either, considering it serves only to make money for Opera?

If Opera was non-free or pushed Opera owned services, then I would agree. But they don't.

In fact, how does Opera generate income?

Probably by Google alone http://www.zdnet.com/opera-google-extend-search-deal-for-two...

Google has bought placement on all non-MS major browsers and portals.

It's interesting to see open-source foundations get corporate patrons. Like Ubuntu's relation with Amazon.

That's always been the case. (Linux < IBM, Oracle, Redhat. FreeBSD has corporate sponsors and so on).

For any project to succeed, it's going to need some kind of funding. And often that means turning to big businesses, who have deeper pockets than all of us little people combined.