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Mozilla and Google Sign New Agreement For Default Search

Posted by Soulskill on from the much-ado-about-nothing dept.

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.'"

33 of 103 comments (clear)

  1. how are the terms able to stay secret? by Trepidity · · Score: 4, Interesting

    As a non-profit organization, don't these things eventually have to show up in Mozilla's annual filings? Or are they somehow aggregated together in an opaque way by the subsidiary relationship of the Mozilla Foundation vs. the Mozilla Corporation?

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    1. Re:how are the terms able to stay secret? by Trepidity · · Score: 5, Informative

      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:

      The Corporation has a contract with a search engine provider for royalties which expires November 2011. Approximately 84% and 86% of royalty revenue for 2010 and 2009, respectively, was derived from this contract.

      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.

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    2. Re:how are the terms able to stay secret? by InsightIn140Bytes · · Score: 2, Informative

      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.

    3. Re:how are the terms able to stay secret? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Interesting

      Not to be dense, but as someone who has used Firefox and even Thunderbird Sunbird/Lightning at times, what else do they do? The About us link I just looked at doesn't spoon feed it to me, so I don't even know what Drumbeat is after reading a hundred words...

      A real question, even if I am an AC.

    4. Re:how are the terms able to stay secret? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Insightful

      Not to be dense, but as someone who has used Firefox and even Thunderbird Sunbird/Lightning at times, what else do they do? The About us link I just looked at doesn't spoon feed it to me, so I don't even know what Drumbeat is after reading a hundred words...

      A real question, even if I am an AC.

      I'd like to think that Mozilla is there to fight the good fight of freedom and openness on the web.

      Apart from FF/TB and whatnot, it would perhaps include doing some R&D and also lobbying/marketing for Freedom(TM) and Openness(TM)...

    5. Re:how are the terms able to stay secret? by icebike · · Score: 2

      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

      Its odd that this income would be lumped under royalties, because the definition of royalties usually implies the payment for the use of something owned by the payee. Such as income from book sales, etc. Mozilla also makes some income from the sale of various products on their web site, per that PDF.

      But assuming you are correct, and Revenues and other support represents the bulk of their income, it would appear that Google is paying for substantially ALL of the development for TWO browsers, Chrome, and Mozilla, as well as providing code for Chromium.

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    6. Re:how are the terms able to stay secret? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Informative

      Not to be dense, but as someone who has used Firefox and even Thunderbird Sunbird/Lightning at times, what else do they do?

      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.

    7. Re:how are the terms able to stay secret? by icebike · · Score: 5, Insightful

      I would be happier if Moz was far less dependent on the add-click.

      Here is a way to make your self very happy: https://donate.mozilla.org/

      Come on, now, that PayPal account has a few bucks you don't need for the holidays.
      Money > Mouth.

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    8. Re:how are the terms able to stay secret? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Informative

      They do all sorts of things, most of them in concert with one or more communities (either Mozilla-centric or not).

      • B2G (Boot to Gecko), an early-stage OS primarly targetted at phones
      • Popcorn.js, a HTML5 Media framework
      • Do Not Track Header Initiative
      • BrowserID Project, an initiative/implementation of a way to reduce the burden of authentication on the web
      • Bugzilla, a bug tracking software used by a lot of folks
      • MDN (the Mozilla Developer Network), documenting their browser, but rapidly expanding to document the whole web platform
      • Develop/maintain the Mozilla websites all in the open (excepting the keys to their boxen, etc.)
      • They support Firebug, the browser debugger

      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.

    9. Re:how are the terms able to stay secret? by arkenian · · Score: 2

      The secret is not, as you observed, the amount. But the precise terms. In basic, what Mozilla and google exchange is pretty well known, but the precise terms are I'm sure something they'd rather not confirm. (does google pay by the click, how much? by quota? etc. etc. etc. is all information that google's comptetitors (and, for that matter, other advertising partners) would like to know. Personally, I've always assumed that Google intentionally "overpaid" on the initial transaction to help out Mozilla -- which would make them even more insistent on keeping the precise terms quiet.

    10. Re:how are the terms able to stay secret? by shog9 · · Score: 2

      Chrome's biggest threat != Google's biggest threat.

      A browser funneling traffic to Google is Google's friend, regardless of the name that appears on it.

  2. Not a huge surprise... by fuzzyfuzzyfungus · · Score: 5, Insightful

    While Firefox's marketshare has been suffering slightly, I can't imagine that the per-seat value of being the default search engine has changed particularly, and FF is probably the competitor from which Google gains the most: FF reliably agrees with them on most major issues, has no significant strength to threaten Google's actually profitable ventures, and no(well, almost no, you could build FF-only XUL webapps; but nobody does) competing application environment.

    Microsoft has a browser, a search engine, win32, and silverlight, so they aren't exactly somebody that Google wants gaining ground, Apple has impressive control of certain high margin markets, and an iron grip on their mobile devices. Firefox has a browser. Unless Google has some aesthetic reason to crush anything it can, and risk the wrath of the antitrust guys, Firefox's existence is somewhere between 'harmless' and 'downright convenient'.

    1. Re:Not a huge surprise... by Tumbleweed · · Score: 5, Interesting

      IE 10 is the most conforment browser to date.

      IE 10? Please. That thing isn't even beta yet. Never underestimate Microsoft's ability to turn a "completely compliant" pre-release browser into "that which must not be named" upon release.

      I like the direction they're going so far, but until it's released, there's no telling what it will REALLY be like.

    2. Re:Not a huge surprise... by Tumbleweed · · Score: 2

      Of course Chrome has no particular reason to want to kill Firefox, but hey.. it's money they could use on their own browser and get search users they don't pay for

      Only some of those users would go with Google. Many of them would go to MS. Plus, money not going to Mozilla isn't necessarily going to go to Chrome. Google has enough resources that they don't have to take any from Chrome to give to Mozilla. That would be like God running out of 'space' for his 'stuff'. Not gonna happen.

      If nothing else, Google should help out Mozilla so they have some decent competition. Things like lazy tab loading, etc. are pushing Chrome just as much as Chrome is pushing Firefox. Firefox has MUCH better memory performance (3-4x better for me on multiple machines) even before lazy tab loading came along in FF8.

      FF is still a better environment for development, and with the use of Tab Mix Plus (and the aforementioned lazy tab loading) is WAY better for those of us who run with a lot of tabs open. The extensions for FF are still far more numerous and more polished than those for Chrome.

    3. Re:Not a huge surprise... by Goaway · · Score: 4, Informative

      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.

    4. Re:Not a huge surprise... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

      FF is probably the competitor from which Google gains the most

      Google doesn't consider FF a competitor.

      Nor Safari. Nor Opera. Nor even IE. Well, maybe older versions of IE which are arguably harmful to the web. Google doesn't make Chrome to take over the browser market, Google makes Chrome to spur innovation in browsers and, more specifically, to push that innovation in directions which Google feels are helpful to make the web a first-class computing platform, because that's Google's platform. If web apps become the dominant form of application software, then Google no longer has to worry about Microsoft or Apple exploiting their OS platform to lock Google out.

      Google made all this pretty clear when Chrome was first released. The whole purpose of Chrome at the beginning was to make a browser that had a really fast Javascript engine, in order to make all of the other browsers invest in speeding up their Javascript engines -- so Google's apps would run better and could do more. Subsidiary goals were to make the overall browser experience faster and more stable, and to remove as much cruft as possible from the browser interface so that web apps had more real estate and less OS-based stuff around them.

      Now, Chrome has moved to pushing HTML5 implementation quality and performance, and Google is beginning to experiment with using it to push new web technologies, like Dart, NaCl and SPDY -- not to lock people into Chrome, but, again, to make the web a better platform. That's why Google is publishing specs and talking to other browser makers about adopting these technologies into their browsers (with little success so far), because Google wants to be able to use this stuff on all browsers.

      What Google wants to achieve is a world where it doesn't matter what device, or OS, or browser you're using, web apps -- especially but not only Google's -- can at least as well as any platform-specific app. Many find it hard to believe that Google would invest so much money in Chrome and Android purely as a way of breaking potential lock-ins and walled gardens by other players in the market, but that's really what those are all about. Googlers are confident (arrogant may be a better word) that given a level playing field, Google will win, because they're just that good. So, it's worth doing some pretty big things just to keep anyone from being able to lock up the computing platforms again.

      So Google's patronage of Firefox is about two things: Maintaining browser diversity to make it even harder for MS to engage in lock-in tactics and revenue. Probably not in that order. Google's agreement with Mozilla buys Google a lot of search page views on which to sell ads. It's undoubtedly a net profit-maker for Google, and one that furthers Google's larger goals for the web platform ecosystem as well.

      The only surprising thing about this move was that MS didn't outbid Google -- but then I could see the Mozilla folks being a little leery of MS, so it may not have been a straight bidding war.

    5. Re:Not a huge surprise... by RebelWebmaster · · Score: 2

      It's still supported on an opt-in basis. But given that it was prone to numerous security holes and was unused by the vast majority of the web-facing population, the decision was made that it made more sense for those who need it to explicitly turn it on (whitelisted, no less) rather than exposing all users to the risks that come with it.

  3. Re:How does this benefit Google long-term? by Millennium · · Score: 3, Insightful

    Google is coming under increasing scrutiny from the antitrust folks, and funding an open-source competitor in the browser space makes it look better. A better image can be worth quite a lot of money when lawyers are involved.

  4. Re:Hypocrites by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Interesting

    I'll explain. FOSS advocates aren't necessarily privacy freaks, though sometimes they are. If they're very privacy aware, almost undoubtedly they hate Google. I know a few people who are very privacy aware (or "privacy freaks" as you put it) - they all hate Google.
    I also know a number of people (and myself too) who are big advocates and contributors to open-source yet are not so paranoid about privacy. Their opinions on Google vary from positive to negative. I like some of their stuff - they're great with open-source - however I dislike how much power they're getting.

  5. Re:Hypocrites by Shikaku · · Score: 4, Informative

    Also you are free to make duckduckgo your default search on Firefox.

  6. Re:How does this benefit Google long-term? by Monkey-Man2000 · · Score: 2

    Google is coming under increasing scrutiny from the antitrust folks, and funding an open-source competitor in the browser space makes it look better. A better image can be worth quite a lot of money when lawyers are involved.

    Also, Google would probably lose a fair amount of marketshare to Bing if Firefox switched to MS as they were threatening to do.

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  7. Re:How does this benefit Google long-term? by somersault · · Score: 2

    They don't seem to be destructively-competitive douchebags like most companies. They compete, but in a positive manner. Whether that's all an act, or genuine, I suppose it doesn't really matter as long as they keep it up.

    I do remember some issue about them bundling their Bluetooth or GPS stack or something on Android, but that's about it. It seemed to me a silly thing to get upset about. I also think it was silly for MS to get into trouble for "bundling" IE with Windows. Why does nobody mind them bundling the Calculator app or Notepad and Wordpad? There are just some things that you expect to come along with an OS for it to be useful out of the box..

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  8. Re:How does this benefit Google long-term? by djh2400 · · Score: 3, Insightful

    A commenter on a previous "Google might kill Firefox/Mozilla by not renewing default search agreement" provided a link to the following article, which I found to be an interesting read, and I would also recommend it:

    http://www.extremetech.com/internet/92558-how-browsers-make-money-or-why-google-needs-firefox

    In short, if Google stopped giving Mozilla the relatively small (relative to their annual profits) amount of money for each period, do you really think Microsoft would wait more than 5 seconds to snatch up such an opportunity to fill in the gap by paying an equal amount? Microsoft would love to get the current Firefox "default search" volume which is directed at Google and instead have it directed toward Bing. If Google stopped paying Mozilla, it seems reasonable to expect some other company like Microsoft to take over the cost in the blink of an eye.

  9. Re:How does this benefit Google long-term? by Daetrin · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Why would Google want to kill Firefox? They don't make a profit directly from Chrome, they make money off of people using Chrome to go to Google pages where they'll be served ads. If people are using Firefox instead but still going to Google pages Google still makes just as much money. If they were somehow able to kill Firefox then some of the ex-Firefox users would move to Chrome, but some would move to IE or Safari or who knows what else.

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  10. Re:How does this benefit Google long-term? by Goaway · · Score: 2

    Google's relationship to Mozilla is basically, "We like what you're doing, but we think we can do better". They have no reason to want Firefox gone, at least not as long as it uses them as the default search engine.

  11. Re:Wow, shocker by rudy_wayne · · Score: 2

    some brain-dead observers who had suggested that Google would ditch this source of money in favor of promoting Chrome, a project which generates no direct revenue at all.

    How does Firefox generate revenue for Google but Chrome does not? They both do exactly the same thing -- people go to Google to search, where they are subjected to ads, which is where Google makes 98% of its money. Google has very deep pockets but it still seems strange that they are willing to pay $100 Million a year . . . . for what exactly? People who type a search query into that little Google search box in Firefox because they are too lazy and/or stupid to bookmark google.com?

  12. Re:How does this benefit Google long-term? by Vellmont · · Score: 2


    I thought this would be Google's chance to kill Firefox.

    Why in the world would Google want to kill Firefox? Google is an advertising company. They make money on people using the web. Google killing Firefox would be like NBC killing RCA. Sure, Google makes a browser that competes with Firefox, but that's only to encourage more web usage. It's in Google's best interests to drive the web forward, and that means browsers need to continue to evolve.


    Microsoft can attempt to tie IE and Bing together and Google can tie Chrome and Google search.

    And either one of them could pay Mozilla to change its default search provider to them. Do you think Bing wants to pull more search traffic away from Google? Of course they do.

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  13. Re:Hypocrites by IwantToKeepAnon · · Score: 2

    Also you are free to make duckduckgo your default search on Firefox.

    Or scroogle.org

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    "Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way." -- Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy
  14. Re:How does this benefit Google long-term? by RebelWebmaster · · Score: 4, Informative

    (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

  15. Re:How does this benefit Google long-term? by RebelWebmaster · · Score: 2

    How exactly would Microsoft "gobble Firefox up"? It's an open-source browser put out by a non-profit organization.

  16. Re:How does this benefit Google long-term? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Funny

    If Firefox dies, I'm switching back to Lynx.

  17. Re:How does this benefit Google long-term? by MightyMartian · · Score: 2

    That gets most of its funding from a Big Company.

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  18. Re:How does this benefit Google long-term? by tbannist · · Score: 2

    If it weren't for George Bush's interference in the anti-trust case against Microsoft, IE probably wouldn't be the default browser in Windows. The issue wasn't just bundling IE, it was the bundling along with all of the other stuff they did, especially the endless emails obsessing over how to destroy Netscape because web browsers represented a potential threat to their operating system monopoly. In the end not much was done, because Microsoft literally bought a pardon from Bush with campaign donations.

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