At the time this wasn’t a big deal, but Dotzler is now the Director of Firefox Desktop - and when November rolls around, it’s safe to assume that he might vote for Bing to replace Google as the default search engine. Back in 2010, one of Mozilla’s noisiest bigwigs, Asa Dotzler, famously renounced Google because of its poor privacy policy, and started using Bing instead.
For the most part, Google and Mozilla have very similar interests, but in recent months some fractures have started to show. If Google fails to renew its contract with Mozilla, do you think that Microsoft would blink an eye at spending $85 million for the majority share of Firefox’s 450 million surfers?Ī better question to pose, however, is to turn the entire premise on its head and ask whether Mozilla wants to renew the contract with Google. Google’s other problem comes in the shape of Microsoft Bing, which might be making a huge loss ($2.6 billion last year!) but it’s also gaining significant traction both in the US and worldwide territories. In all likelihood, Firefox is probably the cheapest source of traffic that Google has. If you extrapolate that out to a total of $4 billion for the year of 2011, Mozilla’s $85 million makes up 2% of Google’s total sales and marketing spend. In the first quarter of 2011 alone, Google spent over $1 billion on ads, almost double what it spent in the first quarter of 2010. Of course you could argue that Google would be better off spending its $85 million on advertising Chrome or Android, but you have to remember that $85 million is the tiniest drop in Google’s sales and marketing bucket. It’s the same story with Opera, which regularly holds an auction for its default search engine: search traffic is worth big bucks. In other words, Google’s status as the default search engine for the majority of 450 million Firefox users directly translates into millions - and possibly billions - of dollars of revenue. While it’s true that Mozilla strongly relies on Google’s royalties, don’t forget that Google is completely reliant on search traffic: of the $8.58 billion revenue earned by Google in the first quarter of 2011, 97% of it is derived from advertising. Why should Big G continue to bolster the saurians of Mountain View when Firefox is stealing and preventing users from installing Chrome?įor one simple reason: money. After all, Chrome is one of the largest cogs in the Google machine, and Firefox is its strongest competitor. It is speculated, mostly by tech pundits, that considering the sheer amount of effort that it’s putting into shoving Chrome down our throats, it would not be in Google’s best interests to re-sign with Mozilla.
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