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Comment by GHFigs | Hacker News Reader

"The majority of our revenue comes from the search functionality in the Firefox browser. Google is the largest source of revenue and in December 2011, we announced that we 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." -- http://www.mozilla.org/en-US/foundation/annualreport/2011/

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I upvoted you because so many tend to forget this. Any comparisons of Firefox v. Chrome need to bear in mind the fact that development of Firefox is enabled by Google.

It's also important to note that the $1B they pay Apple isn't insignificant either:

http://bgr.com/2013/02/11/google-apple-ios-default-search-1-...

just like large part of GOOG revenue comes from Google being the default search engine in Firefox,

some day Mozilla may pull the plug and switch to some other SE i.e. Bing or DDG

Very true - it's definitely a symbiotic relationship. I doubt DDG could drop $300M a year, but MSFT could. Mozilla isn't going to give up that kind of $ just to hurt Google. The numbers vary by source, but across the board you see that FF's market share has dropped by about 1/3 or more since 2009, so every month that number gets lower (which seems to be the trend), FF becomes less and less valuable to Google.

You should probably link your numbers, as from what I know, that's pretty much FUD. In fact, Firefox has gained market share over the past month.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Usage_share_of_web_browser... (same marketshare now as in 2009.)

Should have been clear. I wasn't saying beginning 2009, but their high in market share, which was late 2009. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usage_share_of_web_browsers, which contains the graphic you linked to. In November 2009, FF's market share hit it's high of 32.2%. January 2013: 21.4%. Not FUD: the graph you linked shows the same. That's a reduction of 33%.

The only reason they pay is the marketshare firefox/safari holds.

If it wasn't google paying, it would be microsoft, with bing.

It would be a huge loss for Google currently. Don't doubt for a second that if Firefox marketshare falls under 5% Google will stop paying anything.

Don't be so sure. Google is also one of Opera's biggest clients, paying a significant sum to Opera for search traffic from their desktop browser, despite its much smaller desktop market share:

http://www.zdnet.com/opera-google-extend-search-deal-for-two...

Opera makes about $15M per quarter in revenue from its desktop browser:

http://www.favbrowser.com/opera-software-q2-2012-financial-r...

ok maybe instead of 5% i should have said "an insignificant market share" (5% is still pretty big)

Even Opera's marketshare is significant.

But just imagine, for a second, that 20% of the internet just gets to use bing instead of google.com because it became the default overnight. Outch.

Specifically, they're getting about $300 million per year from the Big Bad Google.

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