'Shockingly,' Google and Mozilla Renew Firefox Deal

[Jack]

Everyone can relax now, Google and Mozilla have announced that they've reached an agreement over the Firefox search deal, ensuring that Google remains the default search engine in Firefox in most countries for three more years and ensuring that Mozilla has the money to continue to develop and improve its browser.

The previous deal ended in November and, when neither Google nor Mozilla made any announcements about it, it became "obvious" that such a deal was never going to happen and that Firefox was dead.

Never mind the fact that, if the deal fell through, Google would have had the most to lose, not only that, Microsoft would have had plenty to gain; Firefox fans must have had plenty of sleepless nights as the fate of their favorite browser hang in the balance.

As expected, Mozilla and Google have reached an agreement

Luckily, they can put it all behind now, as Mozilla will have plenty of money to fund Firefox development for several years to come.

"We’re pleased to announce that we have negotiated a significant and mutually beneficial revenue agreement with Google," Mozilla announced.

"This new agreement extends our long term search relationship with Google for at least three additional years," it said.

Despite obvious facts, some claimed Firefox was dead

Considering the relationship between Google and Firefox over the years, the fact that Google gets a huge chunk of traffic from Firefox users and the fact that failing to fund Mozilla didn't mean the end the Firefox but it did mean that Bing would be getting a lot of new traffic, there was little reason to doubt that such a deal would come through, even if delayed.

That didn't stop some from predicting the end days for Firefox, naively believing (or perhaps not) that Google needed to stop giving money to Firefox so that Chrome would thrive and that Firefox would completely vanish were it not for Google money.

Chrome has been doing a great job overtaking Firefox even with Google paying Mozilla. What's more, Chrome is not making Google any money, advertising is.

The search traffic that Google gets from Firefox is just as valuable as the one it gets from Chrome, though Google would still prefer you use Chrome rather than Firefox.

Finally, Firefox is one of the most popular and successful open source projects out there, believing that it would simply wither away without Google money is more wishful thinking than anything else.

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[Jack]

Would be really interesting to see how much money is Google actually paying to Mozilla compared with the previous agreement .....

 

[NathanF1]

What the pair declined to add: The search giant will pay just under $300 million per year to be the default choice in Mozilla’s Firefox browser, a huge jump from its previous arrangement, due to competing interest from both Yahoo and Microsoft.
Sources said this total amount — just under $1 billion — was the minimum revenue guarantee for delivering search queries garnered from consumers using Firefox.
Google’s main rival in the bid, sources said, was Microsoft’s Bing search service, which was aggressively trying to hip-check it from the main search spot on the browser.
That’s because the software giant has been spending a lot of money in efforts to grow Bing’s market share in the search market.
Microsoft, of course, also owns the still-dominant Internet Explorer browser, but Google’s Chrome has recently been making major gains over both IE and Mozilla’s Firefox.
Still, Mozilla’s recent negotiations with both companies was about search market share.
Yahoo was also in the mix, even though Microsoft powers its search technology, because a hookup with Firefox was considered a plus in holding on to its declining search market share.
But the deal, which was being pushed hard by Yahoo’s Chief Product Officer Blake Irving and its search head Shashi Seth, was determined to be too costly for Yahoo.
Costly indeed, since the new price is much higher than Google had previously ponied up to Mozilla. In 2010, Google contributed 84 percent of Mozilla’s $123 million in revenue.

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[Jack]

Google and Microsoft at war.....Firefox was just the weapon......
Mozilla played this deal very good and got themselves a great arrangement this time.... As long as they keep their market share above 15-20% they'll be ok but let's hope they'll never see how it is to be a browser with under 10% of the market share....
Mozilla can have some serious problems on the long term as they depend financially from their greatest competitors so they need to find alternative sources of finances.