Edunology - Saumya Aggarwal

How Free Firefox make money?

If you are a regular user of the Firefox browser then you are used to seeing the search box in the top right hand corner of the window. You are also used to the default search engine for that box being Google.

That default option didn’t just happen and Google pay to be the first choice. Google and Mozilla renegotiated to extend the relationship between the browser and the search engine until November 2011.

What this translates to is a lot of money for Mozilla to continue developing their many software projects, while Google retains the important default search option in the browser that is increasingly taking market share from Microsoft.

Even though they offer free software, you can see the potential for revenue through these partnerships. That revenue is also extremely important in allowing projects like Firefox and Thunderbird to get the support they need. I’m sure whatever the final direction the Thunderbird e-mail client takes there is going to be opportunities to generate new revenue as well; and Mozilla will certainly take them.

Mozilla, the organization behind the popular Firefox web browser, has extended its search deal with Google for another three years. In return for setting Google as the default search engine on Firefox, Google pays Mozilla a substantial sum – in 2006 the total amounted to around $57 million, or 85% of the company’s total revenue.

Mozilla uses the funds to pay staff, support its bandwidth and hardware infrastructure, and to distribute a number of grants. Because the search giant accounts for 85% of its revenues, Mozilla has become almost totally reliant on Google, something that has apparently concerned a number of members in the open source community. But Mozilla maintains that the two organizations operate independently.

The Mozilla Foundation is a non-profit organization that owns two taxable companies that earmark all profits for the Foundation’s open source projects. You can see the original announcement at Mozilla Chairperson Mitchell Baker’s blog.

It would be interestingly to see if Bing makes a dent into partnership and gain some market share.