Owning the competition
When MS bailed out Apple in the 90s, saved them from bankruptcy and made Office and IE available for it again, everyone cried foul as MS were only doing it to create a credible competitor and get the courts off their back.
Well surely this is no different to what Google are doing now with FireBadger? They have Chrome and Chrome OS, so why do they have any interest in Firefox? It's been clear for years that they have no interest in FF, yet still they feed it millions.
Isn't this just a measure to establish a strong rival so that no one can moan that Chrome and the OS are as bad as Windows, if not worse?
God help Mozilla if Google no longer have a strategic reason to keep them afloat. The next phase will be to swiftly get all the FireBadger users over to Chrome, and with it getting ever more bloated and slow, people may migrate more easily than you might think.
After so many years of nerds arguing over the precision of rendering engines, perhaps we're now approaching the point where none of it matters anymore - They all render well enough to do the job, meaning speed and adaptability are more important. Google and Apple have already chosen WebKit and Opera are doing well with mobiles and other gadgets. So where does that leave Firebadger without Google's money on tap?