THE TECHVOI BLOG

  • Mozilla and Google: Extended Partnership

    Mar 15, 2012

    Google and Mozilla have come to an agreement over the Firefox search deal. The agreement says that Google will continue as the default search engine for Firefox for three more years in most countries. This deal will give Mozilla an opportunity to develop its browser further.

    However, the companies did not disclose the financial terms of the deal. Since Google Search, deal has earned a major part of total income Mozilla generated in 2010 that is 84% of $121.1 million revenue in 2010.

    The original deal between Mozilla and Google ended in November 2011. In addition, neither of both companies made any announcement about their extended partnership that led to speculations that Firefox is going to be dead.

    On the other note, since Mozilla lunched Firefox with Bing in October, again there were speculations about Bing to become Mozilla’s search partner in future. In that case, Google would have to lose much of the net traffic and Microsoft would have to gain on that. Nevertheless, Firefox fans were waiting for the final version of the search engine partnership.

    Eventually, the agreement finalized and Mozilla announced, 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.With this, Mozilla will have plenty of funds to promote the development of their browser, Firefox.

    Even though many people think there is competition between Google’s Chrome and Mozilla’s Firefox, the fact is Google gets huge traffic from Firefox. If it stops funding Firefox, Mozilla has option to collaborate with Bing as search partner and all the traffic would go to Bing. Thus, it was unlikely that Google would let go such opportunity.

    All those rumors that Google has stopped funding Firefox project are put to end by this extended partnership agreement between Mozilla and Google.