Mozilla gets moral and financial support from Google, Inc. – Part 1

Mozilla launched its flagship web browser Firefox version 9 on Thursday, December 23. However, there is more news to the company then the mere launch of their slivery and greyish new browser; it’s the earnings from Google.

To date, Google has been the bread and butter for Mozilla because of advertisement on their browser. It’s more like the way Google works, a big impact but in a subtle way. Google has been Mozilla Firefox’s default search engine and in return, the Silicon
Valley giant has paid a huge chunk of money to the browser developers.

Although it might be a mere pocket money for Google, but it accounts to 85 percent of the $123 Million revenues that Mozilla earned last year. More news on 2011 earnings will pour in at the end of December quarter.

The new agreement between Mozilla and Google has been inked to a whopping $300 Million for 2012 on the Firefox 9 and all its predecessors. However, this ninth version has more potential to gouge market share from its competitors including Microsoft Internet
Explorer and Google’s own Chrome. In addition to catering to PC and Mac operating systems, FF9 addresses mobile operating systems like Android and iOS, most probably the iOS 5 will be included into the fold.

Why Google is supporting Firefox on such magnitude is beyond fathomable but it looks clear that Larry Page and Eric Schmidt’s company wants to dominate the competition between Google and Microsoft on all fronts.

However, this is a win-win situation for Mozilla, whose days had been counted in the last few months because of the new and upgraded IE 9 and massively tweaked Safari.

Jay Lyman, senior open-source analyst for 451 Research, said this is “certainly good news for Mozilla and Firefox and it buys them more time to find other sources of revenue beyond Google’s search advertising. However, that has long been and continues to
be a challenge. At the same time, Firefox and Mozilla are facing intense competition on all fronts, particularly from Google with Chrome. Mozilla’s wise moves toward mobile computing may be intensified or expedited, but the organization faces significant competitors
there too.”

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Posted by Usman Khalid on Dec 23 2011. Filed under Sci-Tech. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0. You can leave a response or trackback to this entry