Why Firefox's Future Lies In Google's Hands

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?"

Comments

Wise or not, what choice do they really have?

[elrous0]

This issue has been discussed on /. many times before. Mozilla needs a sponsor. Their revenues are the only thing that lets them stand out from most of the rest of the OSS crowd as a truly professional piece of software. Lose those revenues and it will eventually deteriorate into yet another lame piece of poorly-documented, poorly-maintained piece of abandonware on SourceForge. So, what options does Mozilla have? Well, they could stay with Google or they could defect to Yahoo or Bing. But MS is even more of a browser competitor than Google. And Yahoo isn't in a financial position to be sponsoring anyone right now. Sure, you could maybe come up with some other more complicated solutions, but $66 million worth? Not many companies, or even groups of companies, have that kind of money to throw around for a little advertisement. There just aren't a lot of alternatives.

So, SHOULD they break away from Google? Probably. CAN they break away from them (and maintain their quality)? Probably not. So, like a bad marriage of convenience, Mozilla is probably stuck with Google until the day (possibly) comes when Google themselves decide to break it off.

Re:Lone Wolf

[richlv]

opera has a surprisingly large market share on various embedded devices (as you mentioned) and in included on very large share of mobile devices.

what i found funny in the summary - "past two years have seen Microsoft, Apple, and Opera close the features gap significantly".

if anything, firefox has mighe have been closing the feature gap with opera, which had absolute majority of the features first.

disclaimer - opera user for many years here.

Is there a reason for Google to shaft Mozilla?

[qazwart]

I don't see any reason why Google would try to harm Firefox. Granted Google has a browser called Chrome, but what Google really wants is for people to use Google as their search engine. With Firefox the most popular engine after IE (and Microsoft wouldn't do anything, but make Bing IE's default search engine), I don't see why Google wouldn't simply extend their deal with FIrefox. They certainly wouldn't want Firefox to move over to Yahoo or Bing.

The only thing I can see is Google would use their leverage over Firefox to get Firefox to switch from the Gecko to WebKit. That would give Google a unified JavaScript/Web browser engine to run their applications against.

It's not usually a good thing to have another entity control your future like this, but Firefox really doesn't have a choice now.