Mozilla Firefox has been given a new Lease of Life by Google

Google will pay Mozilla almost $300M per year in search deal, besting Microsoft and Yahoo to be the default choice in Mozilla’s Firefox browser, a huge jump from its previous arrangement, due to competing interest from both Yahoo and Microsoft. Google is committing close to a billion dollars to bankroll a browser which is a rival to their own browser. 


At $300 million a year, it’s just about three times the size of the last deal ($128M) they signed with Mozilla back in 2008.


That high price might have stemmed from the bidding war between Google and others (Microsoft & Yahoo) and from subsequent anti-trust issues. When it was originally reported that the Google/Mozilla search deal had expired, I thought the end might have come for Firefox, but that is not to be the case any longer with Google's new deal of almost $1 Billion they just signed with Mozilla.


Congrats to you Firefox on the new lease of life.

Will Chrome kill Firefox just like that? Mozilla do something please

It's quite unfortunate that Google's Chrome browser is sending Mozilla's Firefox to an inevitable death if a miracle doesn't happen soon. Though Chrome has been my primary browser for over 6 months now, I wouldn't want it to die because of some excellent add-ons that has made the browser thrive amongst developers. Firefox continues to lose share to Google Chrome as statistics from Net Market Share shows that Firefox has plunged from 25% to 22% and Chrome has rising from under 5% to more than 18% during the last two years. And the deal with Mozilla’s biggest financial backer, Google is in question.A search partnership with Google has historically been Mozilla’s greatest source of income. In its most recent financial statement, prepared in August and published recently online (PDF), the Mozilla Foundation won’t even mention Google’s name :(

The Corporation has a contract with a search engine provider for royalties which expires November 2011. Approximately 84% and 86% of royalty revenue for 2010 and 2009, respectively, was derived from this contract.

In 2010, 84% of Mozilla’s $123 million in revenue came directly from Google. That’s roughly $100 million in funds that will vanish or be drastically cut if the deal is either not renewed or is renegotiated on terms that are less favorable to Mozilla.

When the original three-year partnership deal was signed in 2008, Chrome was still on the drawing boards. Today, it is Google’s most prominent software product, and it is rapidly replacing Firefox as the alternative browser on every platform.

With its biggest source of revenue likely to dry up and a platform that is under attack from Microsoft and Google, how long will it take before Firefox slides into irrelevance?

Source: ZDNet

UPDATE: Firefox is not dying anytime soon as Google has renewed their search deal with Mozilla once again, with almost 3 times the deal they struck with them in 2008. Google will be paying Mozilla $300 Million per year in the search deal.