Because this is *Opera*Watch. Sheesh, what’s the point of making this into an Opera vs. FF discussion?

How do I know all this? Why, I listened to conference call. At Google’s press release announcing the May 31st investor conference call, there are links to streaming audio recordings of the conference call in RealAudio and Windows Media Audio formats.

The conference call recordings can currently be found at investor.google.com/webcast but they will move to investor.google.com/webcast_archive in the future. The recordings pop up in these tiny windows that seem designed to make listening to them difficult. Fortunately, I extracted the actual URL of the RealAudio file of http://video.vdat.com/playmedia_embed2.asp?sid=58148&aid=59475 and loaded it directly into RealPlayer, allowing me to pause, rewind and re-listen to Schmidt’s answers.

The question about Google making a browser starts at 26:15 and lasts until about 28:13. Fortunately, I’ve transcribed the answer below, so you don’t have to listen to it. I haven’t included the question but it can be paraphrased as, “Why doesn’t Google make their own browser that ties in with their other services?”

We would make the decision based on what end-users want and not based on some strategic calculation that we made of our competitors. The industry’s obsessed with this browser question and our observation is that you have number of fine browsers now; people have some good choices. We have a very, very active partnership with the Firefox folks. IE7 is coming out [and] in response to competition from Firefox has gotten better. Safari, which is the Apple browser, looks like a very strong offering in the Mac space. So it looks like people have some good browser choices already. So the way Google operates is we would not build a browser for the fun of building a browser and creating another choice — and by the way, I ommitted Opera and a few others that are also very interesting. We would only do something along the lines you’re describing if we thought there was a real end-user benefit. So far we’ve the seen the end-user benefit has been to augment or expand on both AJAX and JavaScript, which is available on all the browsers. We’re working very, very closely as I mentioned with Firefox, we have a good partnership with Safari and with Opera and a couple of others as well — and that seems like a good answer right now for us strategically.

God only knows what mr. Schmidt actually said and how the reporter (mis)quoted him… But it is clear that Google is encouraging Firefox, while the last sentence is far from it. Of course they like when people use Safari and Opera since it makes them money, but I definitely wouldn’t go so far as to make a claim as presented in this post.

For Google, Firefox is the #1 browser. The others are there just to make them more money; if they truly cared, they would have made their web apps fully functional in Safari and Opera.

“It also has partnerships to encourage the use of the Safari browser among Apple Computer Inc. customers, Norway’s Opera Software ASA, which makes browsers for computers and phones, among several other browser alternatives, he said.“

Google encourages its customers to use a variety of alternatives to Internet Explorer, particularly the open-source Firefox browser.

“support for closed source web-browsers like opera is harder, look at Roboform for example, still unsupported under opera.”

because “Google having a strong relationship with Mozilla, Google has direct access to the source, bugzilla and the firefox development community as a whole.”

You have to understand, 3rd party support under Opera is near impossible. Having access to the source etc can help with 3rd party support, like Roboform and Google improve the browser.