Google and Mozilla: Partners, Not Competitors

Much has been said about the (perceived) rivalry between Chrome and Firefox, but Google engineer Peter Kasting had enough when he read an article trying to discern Google's true motives for signing a new Firefox search deal. Kasting posted to Google+ to clarify what value the company sees in funding a "rival" browser. Quoting: "People never seem to understand why Google builds Chrome no matter how many times I try to pound it into their heads. It's very simple: the primary goal of Chrome is to make the web advance as much and as quickly as possible. That's it. It's completely irrelevant to this goal whether Chrome actually gains tons of users or whether instead the web advances because the other browser vendors step up their game and produce far better browsers. Either way the web gets better. Job done. The end. So it's very easy to see why Google would be willing to fund Mozilla: Like Google, Mozilla is clearly committed to the betterment of the web, and they're spending their resources to make a great, open-source web browser. Chrome is not all things to all people; Firefox is an important product because it can be a different product with different design decisions and serve different users well."

Comments

Google and Mozilla

[InterestingFella]

So it's very easy to see why Google would be willing to fund Mozilla

That is true, but not for the reasons stated. Google is paying Mozilla around $100 million of commissions per year. By the very nature of the deal that relationship is poisoned. Note that Peter is an engineer, and it is very easy to say they want "better web" and stuff like that, but if Google could avoid paying $100 million a year, they would do so. It's better to put that money into their own product, and they really want to do that, but they can't because they would lose users. Google profits from the deal, but at the same time they would want to improve their own market so they don't need to pay anyone else in future.

Re:Google and Mozilla

[theweatherelectric]

Google is paying Mozilla around $100 million of commissions per year.

It's now around $300 million a year.

Re:Google and Mozilla

[Dr. Spork]

...if Google could avoid paying $100 million a year, they would do so. It's better to put that money into their own product...

Not really. They're paying that money in order to be able to fight MSIE/Bing with two sharp weapons instead of one. If they cut off Firefox's oxygen and pumped the $100 million into Chrome, the pressure on MSIE would shrink and not grow. So this absolutely is a wise investment.

Re:Google and Mozilla

[arkhan_jg]

but if Google could avoid paying $100 million a year, they would do so. It's better to put that money into their own product, and they really want to do that

Why? If you assume that most of that money goes into paying for engineers and developers and distribution costs, why is it axiomatic that they must also be employed by google? If the work is good, and gets additional users to use a quickly developing browser instead of say, IE6, then mission accomplished. Firefox takes different decisions and has different emphasis than google, so if your stated goal is a well developed advancing client base, it makes sense to fund a 'competitor' in that the two different projects with different histories will meet the needs of more people than a single browser team can. Firefox has built up a lot of trust by ordinary users the last few years, a number of whom don't trust google enough to install their browser. It wasn't safari or opera that broke the back of the IE dominance, it was mozilla by offering a markedly more functional browser - and that has forced microsoft to resume work on their browser and compete again.

And after all, google tries to make advanced, compelling web apps in order to plonk adverts in as front as many eyes as possible. As any web developer who's had to build their site, and then break bits of it for IE6 in the last decade can appreciate, advanced browsers make it a hell of a lot easier to do that regardless of the name in the titlebar. And this is what microsoft feared and tried to stop for years - web-based, standards compliant advanced apps that run on any platform. When the browser is the platform, who cares what OS it runs on; and thus who needs to keep paying such extortionate prices for windows, and by extension, office? Obviously we're not there yet, and there will always be heavy duty stuff that can't be OS agnostic, but for most people, most of the time, it's becoming far less important what OS you have as long as it runs say, webmail, facebook and whatever sites you personally hang out on. We've cloud books, cloud music, cloud films, cloud email, cloud document apps, cloud productivity apps of whatever stripe, online banking, social networking, cloud photos, the list just keeps on growing. Just look at the roaring growth of smartphones, netbooks and tablets - most of what they're used for is a browser, apps that's basically some form-factor specific UI that gets or dumps everything onto some html5 website, or games.

Competition is good, and it means that people who aren't google can come up with ideas that we can all then benefit from, including google themselves. It's good that google themselves realise that.

Peter Kasting [conviniently] excluded one tidbit

[bogaboga]

It's completely irrelevant to this goal whether Chrome actually gains tons of users or whether instead the web advances because the other browser vendors step up their game and produce far better browsers

I am sure this is what he has in mind:

It's important for Chrome to actually gain tons of users because that potentially creates more search traffic for us, complementing our efforts with Android on the mobile front.

In fact, Chrome's current momentum, which has enabled it to grab more than the initial goal of 10% worldwide usage does not hurt at all.

Someone should tell this engineer that we know what he's thinking.

Re:No, Google like diversity

[hairyfeet]

Uhhhh...that don't make any sense friend as it isn't like MSFT and Apple where if Apple went tits up in the 90s MSFT stood there alone with a big old bullseye. If Mozilla closed shop tomorrow you'd still have Chromium AND Opera AND Safari AND IE AND Dragon AND probably another half a dozen I haven't thought of. Google is about as far from risking antitrust on the browser front as they can get and i'd argue if anything we are swimming in choices more than we have ever had before.

No lets cut through the bullshit and get to the real truth okay? Its not about "advancing the web" or any of that other bullshit its about two things and two things only: Advertising revenue and market share, plain and simple. All of Google's products come down to one thing, selling ads. Even with their numbers declining Mozilla brings them a LOT of eyeballs. if they didn't buy those eyeballs MSFT would have been more than happy to buy those eyeballs so Google shelled out, plain and simple.

Don't you just wish that once, just once, they'd quit with the marketspeak and just tell the truth? I mean how refreshing would it have been for them to say "We make money from ads and searches and Mozilla brings us more revenue, what's to understand?' and left it at that?

Its the money, stupid!

[Rockoon]

Nope. Google understands that diversity is good.

You got modded insightful but slashdot just had a story about that very thing, What do we do when the internet mob is wrong?

Extraordinary claims requires extraordinary evidence. Until such time, there is no reason to believe that its about anything other than the money.

If there's Chrome vs. Firefox vs. Opera vs. IE vs. ....

Well you just blew it right there. Google always defaults new services to browser sniffing and disallowing Opera, even though when Opera pretends to be Firefox that things just work. Could that be because of a small market share, and thus no money inventive, so try hard to get Opera users on Chrome? Yeah.

Re:No, Google like diversity

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually the really nice thing with google is that they can advance the web and at the same time make tons of money. More power to them. Making money aint bad at all. Since consumers aren't damaged in any way (quite the opposite), i'm all for what they are doing.

Google funds ad vector for $300 million / year

[Anonymous Coward]

Google engineer demonstrates why he's in engineering rather than marketing or sales. Details at 11.

Google is spending $300 million / year to:

- Make sure that users of the popular Firefox browser continue to see Google's search engine, and thus Google's ads by default.

- Make sure that Firefox users continue to NOT see Microsoft's ads by default.

End of story. There's no magnanimity here, no making the world a better place. Just business. For that, $300 million / year sounds like a bargain.

Think about it. How much do you think Google pays Apple to make sure that Google is the default search engine for Mobile Safari? Think that Apple does that for free? Same exact deal with Firefox. But throw in a quaintly deluded engineer's explanation of things.

they are nothing alike

[TheGratefulNet]

Like Google, Mozilla is clearly committed to the betterment of the web

mozilla is a foundation to promote software.

google is a COMPANY whose goal i to PROMOTE ITSELF.

stop playing the fool, people. google is not out to help you. they are out to make a profit.

the biggest con is that google created a marketing jingle (sans tune) that goes 'do no evil'. its a lie and most of us knew this from the very start. a company (in america, especially) HAS to be profitable and has to be absent of ethics (well, its not a must-have but it surely helps).

google wants lock-in and they want to serve ads. they are NOT doing things 'to better the internet'. almost everywhere I go (on major websites) when I visit some i/o happens and goes to google. when I order electronic parts, some googleapis site gets triggered! I can't escape google even if I tried, and I have most of their domains blocked.

google is quite quite evil. every one of their plans should be carefully inspected and the real motivations exposed.

yeah yeah, the kids working there get free lunches and shirts. they are bribed to look the other way and they're in their own little bubble, insulated from much of the rest of the world.

google, like the devil, has a great accomplishment: convincing the world that they are not evil. ooooh, shiny websites! they CLEARLY have our interests at heart.

pathetic how we eat up this drivel.

google is the new microsoft. make no mistake who your friends are. google would sell you out as fast as facebook would. neither are your 'friends'.

Re:whatever google, stfu

[Elbereth]

People seem to think that Google is some kind of non-profit charity, powered by rainbows and idealism, with a unicorn as their CEO (and a pony as VP). You can't buy that kind of brand loyalty and PR. It's thoroughly amazing, and, yet, also disturbing, because along with it comes a reluctance to pay any attention to criticism. It doesn't help that Google's detractors, for a long time, were spammers, SEO professionals, shills, and other assorted scum.

I liked Google a lot back when it first became popular. It was clearly the best search engine. They eventually started diversifying into all sorts of things, while always collecting more and more information on their users. Fine. That's how they make their money. I don't begrudge them their demographics information, but if you listen to the average person, Google is doing all this out of the kindness of their hearts, to better make a utopian society, and the whole advertising / data collection business is a distasteful, necessary evil that Google engages in, because they need to fund their good works. And that's if they even recognize that there's a trade going on here. A lot of people, if they see no price attached to something, think that it's completely free, with no associated loss of privacy as a price. Nothing is ever free, in that absolute sense. Even if there's no price, it's still got an opportunity cost.

Microsoft or IBM would literally kill to have this kind of PR. Yes, literally. I think they would outright murder a homeless man tomorrow, if they thought it would buy them this kind of sentiment from the public. Apple is about halfway there, but I think that it's more likely that Apple is a nascent religious cult, as opposed to the true believers lining up to join Google's utopian society.

It seems like it's getting increasingly difficult to find software projects that don't have some ideological drive behind them. You can't just use a program. You're buying into a worldview. Oh well. I guess it could be worse. At least we're not stuck with IE 4 and Netscape Communicator.

Re:No, Google like diversity

[hairyfeet]

Dude you never tried the Dragon? it fucking rocks man! It by default (you can change it on install or after in options if you wish) will set it up so the browser and ONLY the browser uses the Comodo secure DNS which is not only excellent at blocking malware and driveby sites but if your regular DNS goes down its easy to spot with Comodo using a different DNS. It also supports all the chrome extensions like ABP and ForecastFox, is VERY fast and most importantly (at least for me) there is NO tracking. They remove ALL the google ID and phone home behavior of Chrome. You should try it, they even have an option on install that will make it portable and install to a thumbdrive if you wish. Just a rock solid browser and since switching my customers over i haven't heard a single complaint as they all just love the speed and ease of use!

Now this is OT but this is something that most folks forgets about that needs to be said: Today i invited a guy down the hall to Xmas dinner with my family, I just assumed everyone here would have somewhere to go but when the guy invited me to go with him to try to find a food joint open on Xmas it hit me the guy literally had nobody, nobody at all that gave a damn. I get to talking to him and his whole family is dead and the few that are left are distant kin that probably wouldn't even bother to show up to the man's funeral. So I told him to hop in the truck and I'd take him where we would get some REAL food, brought him out to my mom's and had a real old fashioned Xmas dinner with roast turkey and beef, all the fixings, and pies and pudding for dessert. I swear he ate like 3 helpings and was just thanking us over and over because i found out later his Xmas dinner was gonna be a TV dinner.

So on this holiday when so many of us have so much, family and friends, GFs/wives, more tech junk than we could ever use (I just counted and I'm up to 4 PCs and a netbook, how did THAT happen?) please don't forget to ask around and make sure that those around you aren't spending this Xmas alone because that is just damned depressing. After supper i loaded a couple of dozen movies off my USB drive onto his PC for him to watch and mom loaded him down with leftovers so at least i know they'll be one less person out there that had to have a sucky Xmas simply because nobody gave a damn. So do your little part to make this world a better place, okay?