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Why Firefox's Future Lies In Google's Hands

Posted by Soulskill on from the a-fox-in-hand-is-worth-two-in-the-bush dept.

Barence writes "Firefox has just turned five, and it now accounts for 25% of the global market, according to figures from Net Applications. Its success has forced rivals to raise their game, and the past two years have seen Microsoft, Apple, and Opera close the features gap significantly. Google is the default homepage when Firefox first opens, and the default search engine when users type something into the 'awesome bar.' The deal, which runs until 2011, was worth $66 million to Mozilla in 2007, accounting for 88% of the foundation's revenues that year (the last year for which it had published accounts). But now that Google is a competitor as well as a partner, is it really wise for Mozilla to be so dependent on Google?"

2 of 346 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Lone Wolf by atfrase · · Score: 4, Informative

    You need to realize that most of the Firefox community is under 20 years old.

    [citation needed]

    "Under 30" I *might* give you as an out-of-the-blue ballpark figure, although still totally unsubstantiated; "under 20" is just setting up a straw man to justify the rest of your rant. No wonder you posted AC.

    But I understand why you wanted to gloss over that age group of Firefox users -- we remember when Opera cost money. In 2000 they released a free Opera, but it was ad-supported, which I for one would never tolerate in a web browser. It wasn't until 2005 that the free Opera was ad-free, at which point Firefox was already very well established.

    Citation: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opera_(web_browser)

  2. Closing the gap on... Opera?! by Mex · · Score: 4, Informative

    I'm sorry, but other than the huge advantage that is all the plugins available for Firefox, Opera has always been lightyears ahead of any other browser's features.
    http://operawiki.info/OperaInnovations
    Tabbed browsing and Zooming into a webpage are only the two that seem most important and were introduced by Opera, but they have always been incredibly innovative, much more so than Firefox. Yet there's not a big developer following, probably because it is not open source like FF, that's Opera's weakest part I guess, but as a browser, I love it.