I think your biases are showing here. No one said anything about hating anyone. It's about companies (with fudiciary obligations which aren't to the customer) are taking very strong dominating positions in key technologies.
Being Free Software really isn't a concern to most people. Try being a small company that tries to block aggression from Google or Microsoft. Will it matter that Chrome is free? It's not like you can go in and say, "Here I changed Chrome. All users now use this version." For 99.999% of users free software is meaningless.
What would make Chrome much more interesting is if they gave maintanance of it over to a standards body or even a university. At this point "free software" is just nice window dressing.
Yes, they must be. I think Free Software is cool, and I am not upset that Google pays people to write it. I resisted using Chromium for a long time because I thought the Firefox folks were "fighting the good fight". But honestly, their software engineering practices suck compared to Google's and their product is, as a result, not as good. The great thing about freedom is that you can use both. Or you can take the good features from Chromium and put them in Firefox. Or you can make your own web browser.
You can also advertise it on Google as much as you want; they sell ads to pretty much everyone (including themselves).
In the end, I don't feel like Google is wronging me.
could you expand on why you think mozilla's engineering practices suck ?
I have sometimes had a similar feeling, but I have too little competence to be a judge of that.
Because they are not as rigorous as Google's. At Google every commit is read and reviewed before it lands in source control. And they have an entire team dedicated to building the testing infrastructure, so they can do things like testing Flash against every possible input to see if there are any security holes. (There were.) Google is all about being super careful about every line of code. I don't know for a fact that Mozilla isn't, but the quality of the code that I've read in each browser makes me think Google has a better process. But I could be wrong.
Jesse and company have been writing lots of other fuzzers that aren't public yet as well...
Seriously, what you described above (pre-checkin code review and fuzz-testing) are all standard industry practices for web browsers and have been for years.
Being Free Software really isn't a concern to most people. Try being a small company that tries to block aggression from Google or Microsoft. Will it matter that Chrome is free? It's not like you can go in and say, "Here I changed Chrome. All users now use this version." For 99.999% of users free software is meaningless.
What would make Chrome much more interesting is if they gave maintanance of it over to a standards body or even a university. At this point "free software" is just nice window dressing.