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Mozilla Raking in Millions?

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the i'm-a-twentyonaire dept.

truthsearch writes "Internetnews.com wonders about the money Firefox is making in revenue thanks to Google. From the article: 'Mozilla gets paid a publicly undisclosed amount for each Google search query made from Firefox by a user.' This revenue is used to pay the recently formed Mozilla Corporation's 40 full-time equivalent employees and fund project and infrastructure development."

6 of 386 comments (clear)

  1. Who else is contributing? by RLiegh · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Do they also get $ from searches on ebay, amazon, or yahoo (which are also listed on the toolbar)?

  2. Re:Phase 2? by sznupi · · Score: 4, Interesting

    They don't have much choice...Microsoft had essentially destryed "direct" market by driving browsers price to zero. And they need _some_ ways to fund their development.

    --
    One that hath name thou can not otter
  3. How much ? by nocloo · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Lets do some basic math and see how the numbers add up.

    - Of the 100 million downloads lets say 20% are daily/active users -> 20 2illion users.
    - Of the 20 million daily users, lets says 20% do make at least 1 search query. -> 4 million queries/day.
    - If google pays around 0.02c a query. They get 80k/day x 30 days = 3.2Mil x 12 months =~ 38 Mil right there. A conservative number ... but still A LOT MONEY !!

  4. This isn't the first time by The+Hobo · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Firefox has been mentionned based on their search bars, a while ago the German version of Firefox was said to have "spyware"

    --
    There is another kind of evil which we must fear most, and that is the indifference of good men. -- Boondock Saints
  5. Re:Google = "Rich Sugar Daddy"? by babbling · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Unless the anti-establishment mavericks in tech communities like SlashDot aggressively support Opera by buying commercial Opera-Software products, Opera just might disappear, being squeezed to death by the big 3 browers: Safari, Internet Explorer, Firefox.

    Do we care? Opera could have been Firefox if they had GPLed it. Mozilla saw their opportunity and now they're benefiting from their foresight.

    Opera could become an open source (as in "freedom") company any time they want, and they'd instantly see a jump in the number of people using their browser, because suddenly it would be included in Red Hat, Debian, Ubuntu, and so on. Instead they've decided to sell (via a third party) closed-source browsers for mobiles. Good for them, and if they ever decide to put the big "GPL" stamp on their software, then they can count on a sudden jump in the number of people using their software. You can only get that jump with GPL, though.

  6. Re:Spend some of that on disable-output-escaping? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Interesting
    They can also spend it on fixing memory leaks. Spinning the issue is not fixing the issue. I'm about to switch to Opera if FF doesnt get their act together.
    I've already done that. I can live without a couple of extensions I used in Fx (it's hard, but I managed), but I can't live with the memory leaks. One day, I accidentaly left Fx running since morning, with just Slashdot open in one tab. When I got home that night, Fx was up to 870 megabytes of memory usage... That's far from nice, given that I have 512 MB RAM in my PC and can't upgrade it because of i815 chipset limitation.

    So now I'm on Opera 9.0TP2 and enjoying it. 84 MB of memory used after 12 days of Opera running, God knows how many tabs opened and closed and how many sites (incl. Flash and videos) visited. And I currently have 18 tabs open. *AND* it's a technical preview (not even beta software).

    The biggest insult added to injury was the "it's not a memory leak, it's a feature!" attitude from Mozilla.

    I don't plan on switching back to Firefox, ever.