Is Firefox’s future under threat?

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The survival of her company, which pledges to make the web a better place, is at the mercy of one of its main competitors, Google.

If you haven’t heard of Mozilla, you almost certainly know – and perhaps use – its most famous product: the Firefox browser.

Since 2002, it has been steadily gaining market share against Internet Explorer (IE), Microsoft’s pre-loaded, oft-criticised equivalent.

It now has about half a billion users, a huge number of which are evangelists for the software. Many even help create it – it is one of the largest open-source projects on the net.

firefoxLogo

Google likes this. So much so, they pay Mozilla millions of pounds every year to secure a piece of prime real-estate on Firefox’s default homepage encouraging users to perform a Google search.

This investment is believed to represent about 85% of Mozilla’s entire income.

Mozilla loves that, no doubt, but can they trust it?

Mitchell Baker, Mozilla
Mitchell Baker tells the BBC it is important for Mozilla to diversify its income
“If for whatever reason the Google deal wasn’t renewed, it would be difficult,” admits Ms Baker in an interview with the BBC.

“We have a good amount of retained earnings, and we manage it that way so that we would have a long period to adjust, but that’s not the situation you want to be in.”

Why would Google pull out or scale back its contribution? Well, unlike in the past, when Firefox was the only real competitor to IE, the browser war is now a three-horse race. For Google, with its highly popular Chrome browser, Mozilla has gone from being a partner, to one of its competitors.

 

Source: BBC News 

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