> Mozilla has always made the bulk of its money from selling the preferred placement of a search engine in Firefox
It's amazing how valuable eyeballs are -- that you can fund an entire software project just that way.
It's amazing how valuable eyeballs are -- that you can fund an entire software project just that way.
Google certainly values the eyeballs they get via Firefox, but Firefox could disappear tomorrow and that barely affect Google one bit from a pure "eyeballs" perspective. How much traffic would Google lose? People would just use those same Google services through Chrome, Safari, native apps, whatever.
So, I believe Google funds Firefox mainly as a hedge against monopoly charges.
If Chrome ever dominated the browser market entirely with 95%+ marketshare like Internet Explorer back in the bad old days of IE5/6, they'd be painting a large target on their backs for various governments to step in and make life difficult.
If we think about it, Chrome/Chromium's current ~70% market share is pretty ideal for Google. They get to kinda sorta mostly control the web, without a bunch of pesky governments on their backs.
Now that Google is in antitrust court, I think the Mozilla deal is mainly for PR, both positive while it lasts, and negative sense (to avoid being the Firefox killer by not renewing the deal this year -- Google preannounced renewal after Mozilla's August layoffs, and let others repeat the too-high-by-now $400M/year number).
Firefox switching to Yahoo for default search was probably an eye opener for them; 30% of global search traffic (at whatever fraction of users didn't change their search engine) is a boatload of money and from public estimates at least an order of magnitude more than they pay Mozilla for the traffic.
From a business perspective Google might benefit if Firefox disappeared but there's no guarantee. Opera, Brave, Safari, Edge, etc. could take up Firefox's install-base without significantly increasing Chrome's. At least Firefox is a known entity for them and they would probably rather have a guaranteed platform with Google as the default search engine than having to negotiate with whatever sprang up to replace Firefox.
Firefox market share is now in the danger zone where Google can replace it with more Chrome promotion and still save on TAC vs. Chrome-eng+mktg. Also the danger zone where webdevs do not test in Gecko and break Firefox, even on such properties as AirBNB.
Though I do think there is some truth to the monopoly hedge as well.
200 million monthly users is still a lot of people.