Web Devout tidings

Google advertises Firefox on its front page

Google, the current leading web search engine, has begun advertising the Firefox web browser on its front page. The ad encourages visitors to download Firefox with the Google toolbar, and currently appears to only be targetting Internet Explorer users.

Google has long been a supporter of Mozilla Firefox, and has employed several Mozilla developers including Ben Goodger, Darin Fisher, Brian Ryner, and Mike Pinkerton to work in Google’s own Firefox development team. They have also developed a number of Firefox extensions and provide a service that pays website owners to specifically advertise Firefox on their websites.

The Google front page receives a tremendous amount of traffic, and the fact that it is currently being used to promote a leading browser in standards compliance is a very good thing for the health of the Web.

Update: Currently, only visitors in the United States are shown the advertisement.

Here is a screenshot of the advertisement:

Google Firefox advertisement

Update: The advertisement appears to be up or down at different times for different people. If you don’t see it, it may come up for you later.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, April 26th, 2006 at 04:50 UTC and is filed under Browsers. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.

One Response to “Google advertises Firefox on its front page”

  1. wom Says:

    April 27th, 2006 at 18:32 UTC

    There has been a lot of press on this over the past couple of days. I didn’t see it myself but I think it was an awesome gesture from Google. Google has publicly shown their support for Firefox and they even used it during the Keynote at the 2006 CES.

    Great stuff.

    Posted using Mozilla Firefox 1.5.0.2 on Windows.