I was at the internal Mozilla meeting where this was announced (about an hour ago), and Chris Beard (Mozilla's CEO) said very clearly that all the options this time around were economically stronger than the current Google deal.
Maybe that's not true and you have better information than I do, but since you're posting anonymously it's hard to know.
Also, regarding your comment on FirefoxOS: I don't know where you heard that Mozilla expected to support itself through Firefox OS / Firefox Marketplace revenue, but I never heard anybody claiming this (I work at Mozilla). The main reason to introduce Firefox OS was (and still is) to promote openness on the mobile world (i.e. "wrestle duoplogy from Apple and Google"), just as Mozilla/Phoenix/Firefox was introduced to promote openness on the web (i.e. "wrestle monopoly from Microsoft").
Edit: clarifications.
Source? Sounds like total bullshit because the default search provider obviously gets traffic, which drives ad revenue, from the browser vendors. Why would they need alternate revenue streams, let alone those be required by a search vendor? That does not make any sense.
However, they went with Yahoo! because Google wasn't willing to pay what Mozilla needed. The whole "Mozilla picked Yahoo! to enable choice" has been tweeted by every Mozillian I know (and said multiple times in this thread), but it's a meaningless statement
It is possible Mozilla choose Yahoo because they outbid Google. But economically, that seems questionable. What is not questionable is that this change will drive a lot of users to alternate search engines.
In any case, Mozilla is a public nonprofit and releases public financial statements every year. Even if the numbers regarding this deal aren't public now, they will be by the end of the next fiscal year.
Wait, why does Google care if Mozilla is profitable?
Google doesn't really make money from Firefox or Chrome (the browser), per se (except insofar as Chrome increases the value of things that Google does sell that include it, like Chromebooks, Nexus devices, etc.), it makes money from searches, whether default or not. 3 years ago, sure, more searches -- to Google or any other search provider -- came from Firefox than Chrome because Firefox had more usage share than Chrome. That's rather dramatically reversed since then.
I somewhat doubt that. They're both mostly non-default browsers where they are used (and the places where Firefox is default probably have more technically savvy users than those where Chrome is default), Chrome has far and away more current mindshare and is, therefore, probably more likely to be a crowd-inspired (rather than technically-inspired) choice as a non-default browser. I suspect that there was a time when your statement was true, but I don't think its true now. (Though inertia in both camps may make it true even when its less likely to be true for new users.)
Ask anybody that runs ads and they'll tell you Chrome ranks last in CTR. See also:
Tech savvy isn't the only explanation for CTR differences, especially measured CTR difference; ISTR a while ago discussions of what was possible in Chrome v. Firefox for adblocking, and from that it seemed that Chrome ad blockers would still download (but not show) ads, while Firefox wouldn't download them. Don't know if that understanding was accurate or if it is still the case, but that could conceivably result in Chrome impressions being overstated (and CTR being understated) relative to Firefox.
It helps that Firefox has a lot of brand maturity in non-tech circles, whether it's referred to as "Firefox" or by the names of its ancestors. It also helps that Firefox is the default browser on the vast majority of desktop GNU/Linux distributions (which are gaining some popularity now that Windows XP is unsupported and being phased out more aggressively), though this probably isn't as significant of a factor as the existing brand recognition/maturity.
http://thenextweb.com/apps/2012/11/12/opera-users-click-on-t...
Thanksfully a company is more than a CEO, CTO, and Legal affairs. In this case the mission matters more than a temporary set of positions - I would think. And either choice wasn't bad for the mission - in fact, more money so that employees can still be paid is probably a smart choice.
Thus you're complaining about the non-openeness about the decision and the slightly twist of words - and that's fair. But again, it may not matter that much.
Mozilla's 990 forms are public. For 2012 I see a bit more than $9 million in revenue, of which $5.4 million came from contributions [1]. "$300mil a year" makes no sense -- unless there is something I don't know about how non-profits are supposed to report their revenue.
[1] https://static.mozilla.com/moco/en-US/pdf/2012_Mozilla_Form_...
The Form 990 is for the Foundation. You probably want to look at https://static.mozilla.com/moco/en-US/pdf/Mozilla_Audited_Fi... instead, since that includes the subsidiary Mozilla Corporation. Page number 4 (sixth page of the PDF), the "Revenues and other support" table.
Mozilla is a non-profit. This doesn't make sense. Google was paying $300M/year to Mozilla, and I seriously doubt that Mozilla's expenses would be more than that. Most of the work is done by unpaid coders anyways; they don't need vast teams of sales people selling Mozilla, it sells by itself.
$300 million revenue with ~1,000 employees is about $300,000/employee. Pretty good but no guarantee of profitability.
> Most of the work is done by unpaid coders anyways
The only proper response to this is "lol". If you did a comparison, the skew of Mozilla employee versus non-employee contributions would be even more stark than the respective ones from the stats for the Linux kernel that everyone bandies about all the time.
> they don't need vast teams of sales people selling Mozilla, it sells by itself
Wish you could've got this through to Mozilla this when they were facing the prospects of looking for replacement for John Lilly and everybody seemed to be jumping ship to Facebook. They could've saved a ton of cash on the incompetent business folks they brought in and whose only contribution has been to shit on the Mozilla brand and to "other" the existing volunteer community.
Or are you on some sort of [delay](http://olduse.net/)?
Oh hey a throwaway account, what a coincidence.
I'm calling bullshit on this one. Totaly, utter, bullshit.
While I believe the party line is probably true ("Mozilla decided not to go with Google"), it's also disingenuous.
Mozilla chose not to go with Google because Google wasn't willing to pay what they were before. They straight up told Mozilla this 3 years ago when they signed the billion dollar contract; Mozilla had 3 years to become profitable. That's why they switched focus to FirefoxOS; they thought that by now they'd be profitable via selling phones and the app store. (At the time, Bing was bidding against Google, however Mozilla went with the smaller check from Google because they knew using Bing would seem like selling out.)
For the record, Google made billions off being Firefox's default search engine. They paid Firefox $300mil a year for three years, but that was only a small fraction of how much Google profited from Firefox searches. Not sure if it's still true, but three years ago they made more from Firefox than they did from Chrome.
So, yes, Mozilla could have gone with Google still. It's not like Google said "nope, you can't use us as the default!". However, they went with Yahoo! because Google wasn't willing to pay what Mozilla needed. The whole "Mozilla picked Yahoo! to enable choice" has been tweeted by every Mozillian I know (and said multiple times in this thread), but it's a meaningless statement. If they really meant that, you'd be prompted when you opened Firefox the first time to pick a search engine.