Douglas MacMillan at BusinessWeek has a story titled "Mozilla Contemplates a Future Without Google". Some of it comes from Mozilla Foundation chairman Mitchell Baker.
Mozilla gets much of its revenue from Google.
In 2007 that was US$75 million.
Their contract expires in 2011.
Google now has Chrome.
Will the contract be renewed?
Will Mozilla switch to another search engine?
Google may renew the contract with Mozilla.
According to the story Mozilla's Firefox has 22% of the browser market compared to Microsoft's Internet Explorer with 67%.
Nokia is planning to launch Fennec, a Mozilla browser optimized for mobile platforms.
Google spokesman Eitan Bencuya says:
"Obviously we are now in the browser space but we remain great supporters of Firefox."
"It was Mozilla that kicked off most of the innovation we have seen in browsers over the last few years."
http://www.businessweek.com/technology/content/mar2009/tc20090311_813488.htm?campaign_id=yhoo
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"Firefox needs Google more than Google needs Firefox." This is a good summary. |
"Yahoo! (YHOO) and Microsoft's MSN, Google's two main search rivals, come to mind"
Because M$FT obviously want to fund one of their rivals :) I hope the Mozzy/Google partnership continues, although even if it didn't I expect most of us would change the search and homepage to Google any way :P |
Googles needs firefox extremely extremely much, when on a strangers computer I sometimes use live search, simple cause its default and I don't care to change it. In the same way one out of five users have google set default and will use it as well and as far as I know most users don't care to change. (Currently I am using flock and they have yahoo default and nobody cared to write some good explanation or plugin to change everything to google and still the 404 page mentions yahoo at the bottom of the page...)
Well, on the other hand I know (older) people who are totally oblivious to how configurable computers are and every time she – an elderly woman in this case – starts up IE, she will hit the arrow for most visited urls in the url bar and select google.com... so I guess that's not true for everyone. None the less alltogether 1/5 of the internet population defaulting to google is quite a lot, so I would say google will probably continue the contract, even though I wouldn't be suprised if they will lower the actual amount they pay mozilla... |
What's Google's global market share in search? 81.5%
What's the market share of the browsers that default to Google (Safari, Chrome, Firefox, Opera)? 33%
* according to http://marketshare.hitslink.com (February, 2009) |
Chrome was quite controversial within Google. There are plently of Firefox fans within the company – Mozilla employees even get to eat for free in the Google canteen (although this might be unofficial). At any event, supporting FF means IE getting less market share which is good for open standards which Google prefers. |
