Edit: I mentioned this before below, but I'll repeat it up here. I work for Mozilla, but was not involved in the inner workings of this deal. I'm stoked to know where my salary is coming from though :)
While I agree you can also look at this from a perspective of mutual benefit, it's certainly not an obvious open-and-shut deal, especially not with Chrome in the mix. It's simply a matter of priorities, and as I noted in the grandparent, it's easy to conceive a situation where this perspective may shift.
Also, I think that executives care about the opinions of shareholders about as much as Congresspeople care about the opinions of constituents, i.e., they don't care at all unless it looks like something will cause a major disruption to their continued employment.
> They could stop giving their browser away and sell an "ad-free" version for $5, which bundles Adblock and blocks google ads.
Simply isn't enough to make up the difference and may even end them if they tried it. Paying for free features and inferior browsers? (Yes I use Firefox but also Chrome.) What is this, 1993?
For more thoughts on this topic, see http://www.squarefree.com/2011/08/12/how-mozilla-could-impro...
Mozilla would switch away from Google in a heartbeat if the money was right.
Yep, Larry, Sergey, and Eric has dual-class stock AFAIK. I think the real problem with this comes from the greedy legacy MBAs who abuses this.
A massive percentage of the internet using population do not know what a search engine is. I've seen people put "www.facebook.com" into the google search bar. People do not know the difference between the google search bar and their address bar.
Google gets a LOT more money from Mozilla than Mozilla gets from Google! Firefox is not "1%" of the web browsers, its still the major one in many areas, this means billions and billions of Google search uses.
And it does actually please shareholders that such a deal is made. It's a HUGE difference.
As an analogy, consider Apple and Best Buy. Apple owns its own retail stores, and those stores are competition for Best Buy. But Apple isn't really in the business of retail; they have no reason to stop you from buying Macs and iPads at Best Buy. Retail is just a channel for Apple's real business, and its to their advantage to push their product through the channels they own and the channels they don't.
The browser is a channel for Google's core business of search advertising. Like Apple, they get some benefits from building and controlling a distribution channel of their own. But they have no motivation to stop pushing their core product to users of other browsers too.
I presume that the same is also true of eBay in some fashion.
The query string includes this: tag=mozilla-20
(To be sure, I just checked this in three different instances of Firefox: Iceweasel 9 on Debian, Firefox Nightly on Debian, Firefox 9 on Windows.)
Search YouTube: tube <query>
Search Urban Dictionary: urban <query>
Search Amazon: amazon <query>
Search Wikipedia: wiki <query>
g - Google
gg - Google Group
b - Bing
d - DDG
q - Yahoo stock quote
s - Stackoverflow
w - wiki
y - Youtube
dt - Dictionary
t - Google Translate
Originally you had to dive into a config file to add non-default search providers, but it's now in the UI just like Firefox, right click any text field and select "Create Search".
that's clever.
Bing and other search providers would be willing to spend lots of money to have the default search status. Just because Google has always purchased this spot in the past does not mean that google is the only way Mozilla can monetize search.
While I don't believe that selling the default search spot is problematic, I do believe it's risky and dangerous to make that the primary source of revenue, especially when the major potential bidders have serious conflicts of interest with supporting Mozilla (that is, they provide competing or incompatible services and products).
I'm assuming you mean IE.
>nobody should be surprised when Bing plays dirty and intentionally degrades the experience for Firefox users in an attempt to compel a switch to IE
MS would never degrade performance on their own platform. Tying IE into Windows was different; they made the default work better than the alternative. They're not going to intentionally make Bing shitty for FF users; they'll just go elsewhere. They might integrate Bing and IE more fully, adding features and making it more difficult to use other engines, but they would never intentionally degrade their own product.
I dunno what make you think Google is "less evil" than Microsoft in that area. It's just business. Deal profits Google, Google makes deal. When the balance changes, Google will stop making the deal.
Hell... "google" is a verb in the dictionary: http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/google
Really this is true of open-source software as a whole. There really needs to be a better way to monetize than begging for donations and/or selling T-shirts if these projects are going to live on. As times continue to turn tenuous, this will only become more crucial.
I fully believe in OSS and Mozilla specifically, but the reality is that we have to find a way for OSS to be at least somewhat profitable without relying on the goodwill of a handful (or less) of benevolent entities.