Google Still Supporting Mozilla Even With Chrome's Lead

News
By Douglas Perry
published

Following news that Chrome has surpassed Firefox in market share in November, there have been rumors that Google may not extend a contract with Mozilla, which provides the lion's share of Mozilla's revenue.

A "royalty" contract, which is based on advertising revenue generated by searches from Firefox ended in November and there has been no news from Mozilla whether that contract has been renewed or not. Typically. Mozilla chairman Mitchell Baker blogs about any critical announcements and since there has been no news from Baker in almost a month. The speculation is that Google may have told Mozilla to take a hike.

However, German website heise.de reports that, according to Google, there is a still a contract in place. Google royalties are critical for Mozilla to survive as 84 percent of the foundation's funds were provided by the Google deal in 2010 - more than $100 million annually. Common sense would suggest that supporting Mozilla would still support Google's ad revenue base as Firefox still holds about 25 percent of the market and those search revenues are nothing to sneeze at. However, a decline in market share hurts Mozilla's negotiation leverage with Google and it may be a good idea for Mozilla to diversify its revenue base.

Microsoft may be inclined to give Mozilla a good deal if it decided to promote Bing in its browser by default - and not just in a special version that is released on the side.

Douglas Perry
13 Comments Comment from the forums
  • COLGeek
    Seems like good business sense to me. Good for Google and Mozilla.
    Reply
  • digitalzom-b
    Honestly, I dislike bing. I don't like the way it looks and it feels slow to me. Also, the results are pretty shady. We binged something normal, and the first result gave my friend's computer a virus. It was probably an Ad, but a lot of people using Bing are going to assume that the first result is what they really want since that's kind of the way they advertise it.
    Reply
  • Goldengoose
    If that were to happen, the only way it would effect FF user would be in this circumstance:

    Fresh format of computer -> install windows -> use IE to download FF -> Change default browser -> download ad ons. My god, what a hassle! :P

    They'd be better sticking with google and we all know it.
    Reply
  • monkeysweat
    If a contract's in place you gotta honour it,, besides it's just fair practice, what if the door started to swing the other way again,, Mozilla would just do to Google what the would've done to them

    i'm not crazy about bing, either, BUT it's cached views are a saviour to me as there are alot of sites I can't access from work for information and it's a pain in the arse to go about requesting each individual website access -- google's cached pages get blocked & bing's don't :)

    Reply
  • sosofm
    I like Aurora 10. I had Chrome and i don't like at all. I can customize much better Mozilla.
    Reply
  • belardo
    So where is the news on the release of Opera 11.60 from yesterday?

    Instead, we get BIG NEWS about BS Major revision numbers (8 now, right?) which is really 4.4.
    Reply
  • chrome's lead what?? with no 100% ABP support, no no script support, no https anywhere support and no way to stop google for defaulting to give results based on geolocation??? Mozilla all the way.

    Reply
  • livebriand
    Chrome's trojan-like advertising strategy and lack of great addons (as ramono said) drove me back to Firefox. I dislike Bing, but it doesn't really matter what you include, because I'll quite easily switch it back.
    Reply
  • pedro_mann
    I'm thinking that if Google shows goodwill toward a competitor it may have a positive effect on anti-trust negotiations. If they were to kill off their deal with Firefox and Microsoft didn't take the bait all of a sudden it could spur new anti-trust investigation. A touchy thing, these browser wars are.
    Reply
  • nahuelcutrera
    dude they can't add ABP support for chrome they owned every add in the web they'll be blocking themselves LOL, mozilla is google, the truth is they needed firefox to take away microsoft monopoly back in the day, now they just keep it going because they copy paste firefox make it a little better and thats chrome...
    Reply