This is not the Google Search app but rather a search app bundled with Firefox. You can tell: it uses Firefox design language and iconography and is called "Firefox Search"; the Google Search app looks nothing like this. Because of the open intent-based nature of Android, apps can hook into the swipe up gesture. If you also have the Google Search app installed, you should've gotten a dialog to select between the two, at least the first time you activated the swipe up.
If you want to blame someone for this, blame Mozilla, but honestly, it's probably just an innocent mistake. This search app seems rather new (I just noticed it the other day, too) and probably doesn't get much usage, which I suspect is why it's not hooked into all the main app preferences yet. Jumping the gun to criticize Google here is... unfortunate.
I had a surprisingly similar experience from the other side. I purchased an iPhone 4 off of eBay and realized after receiving it that it was locked to the wrong carrier. I reviewed the auction and confirmed that the seller had listed an unconditional return policy (which I had specifically looked for while scanning auctions just in case ). The seller ended up refusing to honor the return policy and taunted me to contact eBay with it, who then simply refused to enforce the return policy. I was thankful in this situation that sellers can't leave negative feedback because I was able to leave negative feedback without anxiety over possible retaliation, but I can see how it'd be really annoying if I were a seller dealing with a dishonest buyer.
While I was interning at Mozilla last summer, I developed this design and prototype for a new bookmarks manager: https://github.com/cleercode/mozaic Also worked a bit on Panorama.
Unfortunately, didn't really get any momentum (mainly because there's just a long pipeline of things that are higher priorities), but maybe it'll go somewhere in the future. I agree that it's a weak point.
Also note that the buttons in the header area of Google+ are <a> tags, probably since they actually link to separate pages. I guess that's Google's practice.
I've stupidly been doing all my dev and testing in Chrome OS X. I tried out Firefox OS X today and located several bugs that were preventing main functionality from working; they're now fixed. Maybe that applies to cross-OS Chrome somehow? (I got other reports about things being broken on Chrome Windows.) If you get the time, I'd be thankful if you could try it out again and let me know if anything's fixed. I haven't figured out the change URL/share URL bugs yet, though.
If you want to blame someone for this, blame Mozilla, but honestly, it's probably just an innocent mistake. This search app seems rather new (I just noticed it the other day, too) and probably doesn't get much usage, which I suspect is why it's not hooked into all the main app preferences yet. Jumping the gun to criticize Google here is... unfortunate.
For comparison, here's what the Google Search app looks like: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.google.and...