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Mozilla and Google Sign New Agreement For Default Search
An anonymous reader writes "It appears Google will not cut their default search arrangement with Mozilla. From the official blog post: 'We're pleased to announce that we have negotiated a significant and mutually beneficial revenue agreement with Google. This new agreement extends our long term search relationship with Google for at least three additional years.'"
It's not like they need to report line items. They get their money from Google and this is the amount. What else do people need to know?
Remember to maintain your supply of
Answering my own question, it looks like it does more or less come out in the reports. Here [pdf] is their financial report for 2009-2010. It reports that they earned "royalties" of $101 million in 2009 and $121 million in 2010, and they explain their royalties as follows:
So that seems to imply that "a search engine provider" paid them around $87 million in 2009, and $102 million in 2010. Of course, the current deal may be substantially higher or lower, but that's probably a ballpark figure. Somehow considerably higher than I expected, but now that I look it seems Mozilla has >600 employees, which is also many more than I expected.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
So that seems to imply that "a search engine provider" paid them around $87 million in 2009, and $102 million in 2010. Of course, the current deal may be substantially higher or lower, but that's probably a ballpark figure.
It's not a fixed amount, it's revenue share from ad clicks. When Firefox user clicks any Google ads, Firefox also gains revenue. It's the same with Opera and other browsers. The only thing they need to negotiate is how high that percent is. Since Firefox market share has gone down, the amount Google pays them has as well.
Also you are free to make duckduckgo your default search on Firefox.
Chrome is proprietary, dart, NACL, SPDY, and special javascript extensions,
All of these things are entirely open and unencumbered, and free for use by anyone.
If with "they" you mean the Mozilla Foundation (which should be right, considering you're talking about drumbeat), then primarily what they do is try to be the lever in whatever project comes along which furthers the mission of advancing the Mozilla Manifesto.
Wow, that sounds very handwavy. Let's try again.
The Mozilla Foundation is a non-profit foundation, consisting of just a handful of people. They fully own the Mozilla Corporation (which makes and promotes Firefox), and give it the goal of not just making the best browser possible, but to use this to help keep the internet open. This means the vast majority of work is being done by the Mozilla Corporation. What the Foundation focuses on besides this (with limited money and people, compared to the much larger size of the Corporation) are other ways to help make the web a richer and better platform; a more versatile platform, which has a better chance of staying open. The annual report lists focus areas like identity, apps, education, etc. These are areas where it doesn't always make immediate sense for the people who develop Firefox to focus on, but which are relevant in the bigger battle to keep the web the healthy open platform it is today. Drumbeat is one way in which the Foundation tries to find and fund projects (both with money, and by gathering interested people) that work within these focus areas.
So yeah, basically what the Foundation does is try to take the long view on the web, trying to act as its protector. Where possible, it uses its most powerful tool, Firefox, to ward off threats to the openness of this platform (think of the very public stance on the next generation video codec for the web; without Firefox, everyone would have have to knuckle down to MPEG-LA and have to pay to publish H.264 video - now, there's a very good chance that video on the web will be open and unemcumbered). Where threats (or the solutions to them) are less clear, they get involved in conversations, try to incubate projects to explore options, and basically make people aware.
They do all sorts of things, most of them in concert with one or more communities (either Mozilla-centric or not).
Plus all of the other things from localization to interacting with the standards bodies for HTML, CSS, JS, etc. to give feedback/help push the web platform in a good direction.
I'm sure I left a million things out. They really do a whole lot, and anyone with the time and a bit of knowledge can dive in and help them with 99.9% of it.
(Hint, it is not Chrome, Chrome gets people out of Firefox mainly.)
I would disagree with that statement. While Firefox has lost a bit of market share to Chrome, most of Chrome's gains have come at the expense of IE. Look at the trends.
http://arstechnica.com/business/news/2011/12/internet-explorer-stops-its-slide-as-chrome-nears-firefox.ars