Theoretically Google could sell that space. They trade this potential profit to promote their own product, at a loss, of how ever much that space could be sold for. This is like economics 202, opportunity cost.
(http://www.asymco.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/11/Screen-Shot...)
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.
As for Google Search ads, let's take the number of search requests[1], an example CPC they give[2], an example CTR they give[3], the StatCounter portion of non-Chrome users[4], we get 1216373500000 * (1-0.3) * $0.10 * 0.005.
That's $425,730,725 for a one-year campaign in 2012. Given the prominence of this ad (and its unintentional scare value), the CTR is probably off, so that's a very conservative figure.
If that is indeed 70% of the whole campaign cost, the total is $608,186,750 per year.
[0]: http://www.mediatransports.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/12/Qu...
[1]: http://www.internetlivestats.com/google-search-statistics/
[2]: https://support.google.com/adwords/answer/2375420?hl=en
[3]: https://support.google.com/adwords/answer/2615875?hl=en
[4]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usage_share_of_web_browsers#Sum...
A web service that only works in Chrome? Maybe you mean web application (web service would be really odd to work in just one browser). Do you have a source for this regardless? I hadn't heard of this.
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.
The Google Hangouts website uses some carefully-constructed language to imply that people must download Chrome to use Hangouts, even though a Hangouts NPAPI plugin supposedly exists:
https://www.google.com/hangouts/
The Hangouts Chrome extension won't work in your current browser. You'll need to
download Chrome before installing the Hangouts Chrome extension. Do you want to
download Chrome now?
Then you ask yourself why the goals were set the way they were. Obvious guess at an answer: because they only want to target "mobile" and Android+iOS cover most "mobile" clients. Had iOS had less market share, I will bet the goal would have been Android-only (modulo advice by lawyers based on antitrust worries in that situation, of course).
No malice anywhere along here, but the end result is not so distinguishable from malice, sadly.
That's the other easy explanation as to "why iOS?"
Note, not picking on you, just Internet in general.
The old saying was "Windows is not done until Lotus won't run", and the DR-DOS case shows it might not have been an exaggeration
Google/Chrome also works hard to support "what's already out there", which is what you mention, but what we're discussing now is building on your supposedly-open-but-really-proprietary platform _against_ other players, whether that's policy or coincidental with constraints.
Microsoft spent effort making sure Windows itself WON'T run on DR DOS before that. They constantly ignored web standards after they won the browser wars (conveniently working well with Microsoft tools that produced non-standard markup, though) ... up until the moment they lost them again, at which point they started to pay attention to standards again.
With their last few releases, Google seems to be adopting this Microsoft style of evil. Some people defend that, and some don't.
That said, I agree that more FxOS bits need to end up on standards tracks. The permissions issue really needs solving to make serious progress there.
If there was a web standard way of caching 5GB of files locally then I would be annoyed.
2) It's not an accident that Google's webservices work best (sometimes only) in Chrome.
They're way past the "disrupt IE" goal. They're into the "tightly couple our web service and Chrome and try to force out other options" goal.