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Comment by codingdave | Hacker News Reader

Didn't Mozilla just drop their contract with Google, saying they no longer needed that revenue? So their dependence on Yahoo was a deliberate and recent choice.

While I'm not arguing the ideal of an non-corporate support model, I am curious how it only took a few days to go from "We don't need the revenue" to "Save Mozilla."

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Before the arguments were "Save Mozilla from Google" instead of "Save Mozilla from Yahoo". Spreading the reliance over multiple search vendors is at least a step in the right direction.

Firefox's deal with Yahoo (or any other search engine) is only valuable so long as Firefox has lots of users. And Firefox's market share has been dropping for years now. That's what the author is worried about.

If the global desktop share of Firefox fell from 31.64% in January 2010 to 16.53% in February 2015,[1] it represents a loss of 3.7% per year (15.11% / 49 months * 12 months / year). In theory, Firefox should reach zero market share in 3.7 years from now, just before the Yahoo deal runs out.[2]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usage_share_of_web_browsers#St...

[2] https://blog.mozilla.org/press/2014/11/yahoo-and-mozilla-for...

A linear rate is not very realistic here. Exponential decay would be better, but still probably completely useless as a predictive tool.

> Didn't Mozilla just drop their contract with Google, saying they no longer needed that revenue?

There was a clickbait title that just came up but the contract came up months ago and Yahoo won the bid for the US default search provider.

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