Guest post by After much speculation over whether Mozilla, the non-profit foundation, and Google, the search and advertising company, would renew their default search provision deal, Mozilla has announced that a new multi-year deal has been made. The deal will see Google continue to be the default search provider in the Firefox browser for “at least three additional years”.
What that initial announcement did not say was that: 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.
Good for Mozilla!
http://www.h-online.com/open/news/item/Mozilla-and-Google-make-new-…
I originally tried to link two articles, one about the announcement of the deal, and another reporting the financial arrangements.
Here is the second link:
http://allthingsd.com/20111222/google-will-pay-mozilla-almost-300m-…
Google Will Pay Mozilla Almost $300M Per Year in Search Deal, Besting Microsoft and Yahoo
No sweat. We don’t expect competence from you.
Anyone who sticks two fingers up at Microsoft gets my confidence.
Merry christmas all
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If it hadn’t been for Google’s original search deal with Mozilla, which, as far as I know, contributes the majority of their funding, it wouldn’t have been possible for Firefox to become the browser it is.
I’m very glad to see that now, even though Firefox is a competitor to Chrome, Google is continuing its relationship, even at a higher price. I hope it’s not just to put its thumb in Microsoft’s eye.
25% of all users use Firefox, it would be stupid not to have them use Google Search by default. It isn’t charity.
Mozilla was around, able to make that initial Google deal, also thanks to the early support from AOL …they were funding them for quite some time, basically also in the “formative” period of Phoenix/Firebird/Firefox (which BTW & IMHO, back then, was perhaps more “unspoiled” when it comes to what it was / what it wanted to become; the present incarnation did good when it comes to usage share, but some early ideals were lost)
And accept that many of the things Chrome is doing are great and must be copied..
Sandboxig, PPAPI for plugins, Chrome Store, etc..
You should have left the Chrome store out. It is a walled garden where webapps that can run in any modern browser are crippled to only run on Chrome.
Everybody talks about how much money mozilla gets but nobody seem to want to talk about how they are spending it.
Mozilla is a non profit organization and this means all the money they get get used somehow and none of it goes out to anybody as dividends.
How are they going to spend all that money?
How many paid developers does firefox have?, how much are they getting paid on average?
How much does firefox pay to host its infrastructure? Firefox infrastructure is made up of what exactly and why do they cost as much as they do?
What other projects does mozilla manage?, which ones costs most and which ones cost least? why?
There are a lot of questions to be asked, lots of answers to be given but nobody online seem to be curious about this.
Maybe people don’t ask about Mozilla, because the information is right there ?:
http://www.mozilla.org/about/mission.html
http://www.mozilla.org/grants/
http://www.mozilla.org/about/organizations.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mozilla.org#Donations
http://static.mozilla.com/moco/en-US/pdf/Mozilla%20Foundation~*…
Have to admit I’m not very good at reading financial reports, but there are many people who can.
Basically, it is one of the few organisations which is trying to keep the web secure, open, accessible for everyone (probably some things I forgot, like privacy ?).
Which is something Google, Microsoft, Facebook and many others do not care about.
Here is an article on which new projects Mozilla recently started thinks they can (help to) achieve this:
http://www.infoworld.com/d/open-source-software/mozillas-3-bold-bet…
It isn’t easy, but IE also had a more than 95% market share when Mozilla started.
Good question.
They give money to the Parrot VM project, which doesn’t seem to have any direct benefits to them. Maybe they fund other open source projects withe their excess?? But there certainly is a possibility that money could be spent on things besides open source development, but hopefully they give a full accounting somewhere.
that Microsoft didn’t get that deal. How can you have their billions upon billions and let Google outbid you when you are desperately trying to get Bing up with Google?
in their own stuff, such that they have to pay 300 million per year in order to protect their monopoly position in search space.
Lol, well atleast they have confidence enough to use their own search algorithms, unlike Microsoft which has so little faith in their own capacity that they copy Google search results and present them in Bing.
You do realize how ridiculous that comment is, ……right?
No, please educate me. Microsoft was caught copying the search results directly from Google, the test was very carefully thought out. Google tied a hundred bogus search terms like ‘sdjasdahss’, ‘xmncbbhsdld’ etc directly to certain sites. They then searched using those terms through bing and voila, bing showed these totally unrelated sites which could only be tied together through Google’s tailored search results. Microsoft tried to claim that it was due to them picking up searches from an opt-in toolbar which is laughable since the only way that would have worked is if the people who had installed that toolbar would have searched on Google for those hundred bogus terms, and triggered the special linking.
Google has a great search engine. Microsoft used it as a tool, only a part of the search chain, and for comparitive purposes. It has nothing to do with lack of faith in their search engine. To say that Bing simply copies Google search results only shows you don’t actually know how Bing works. Which is fine, it’s not like assumption and misinformation is something new on the internet.
That’s exactly what Google did. From http://searchengineland.com/google-bing-is-cheating-copying-our-sea… :
20 Google engineers were told to run the test queries from laptops at home, using Internet Explorer, with Suggested Sites and the Bing Toolbar both enabled. They were also told to click on the top results. They started on December 17. By December 31, some of the results started appearing on Bing.
Neither does MS apparently since they also bid.
Edited 2011-12-27 04:53 UTC
I think it would be less valuable for Microsoft if they had the default firefox search as Bing. Most firefox users I know would immediately change it to google. Some others would just switch to Chrome instead.
The average user doesn’t consider the search engine they use as much as your friends do. All they really expect is to load their browser and see a search bar. They type in what they want, and expect to see results. Whether Google provides that, Bing, Yahoo, whatever, it doesn’t really matter. The average user also doesn’t care about all the integrated and/or extended capabilities either (Google+ for example). When you compare the entire user base vs. those who actually do more than search, it’s very clear only a small percentage give a damn about that stuff. A small percentage of an enormous number is still a lot, but overall any search engine set as the default is going to benefit from being such.
Not quite, Google gained popularity with the general public because their search engine actually WORKED. Do you not remember the days of Excite, AskJeeves, Lycros, Altavista, Yahoo etc.? Back in the old days everybody and their dog had a search engine and all of them sucked until Google came about.
And yeah, if it works… well, it’s almost all that matters – it can still be argued users don’t care much about what’s beyond basics & “good enough”
I would not put it past Mozilla to have chosen a lower dollar figure from Google just to snub Microsoft for being anticompetitive jerks.
The $X value of the deal is undisclosed, and has only been the subject of speculation so far; the All Things D article which claimed to reveal it didn’t give any indication of how it knew it, aside from referring to unidentified ‘sources’.
So I think that the phrasing in this story is a bit misleading, it should present it as only a claim made by 1 journalist (and then echoed by the news-hungry press).
I hope this deal keeps Mozilla and Firefox humming along. I REALLY like having an alternative to browsers owned lock-stock-and-barrel by Big Vendors Google and Microsoft. Never was there a greater need for a viable competitor like Firefox.
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2011/12/28/google_mozilla/
Some people seem to think Google gave Mozilla a sweetheart deal when it renewed its search agreement for Firefox. At roughly $300 million per year, it will fund quite a bit of open-source development at Mozilla, but this isn’t a case of Google going soft during the Christmas season. It is, as Mozilla veteran Asa Dotzler argues, simply a case of Google paying the going market rate for traffic to its ads.