Firefox has secured its near future, at least on the financial plan for another three years after its creators succeeded to renew the contract for advertising with the search engine giant. Mozilla CEO Gary Kovacs announced the new deal for the next three years in a blog post. The partnership between Google and Mozilla provide a consistent source of revenue for promotion and development of the Firefox browser, resulting from the distribution of advertising messages via the Google search engine. Unfortunately for Firefox, the initial contract was about to expire later this year, and the direct competition presented by the Chrome browser made its renewal extremely unlikely.
Google has decided to extend the agreement with Mozilla, however, as sharing the advertising revenue brings in large enough proceeds to benefit both companies, and conflict of interest doesn’t represent an insurmountable obstacle. Therefore, Firefox secured for another three years the financial resources it needs to survive in the competition presented by alternative web browsers like Opera, Internet Explorer, and why not, Google Chrome.
Even if, somehow, the decision by Google is a betrayal of its own web browser, Firefox in the long term could become a reliable ally in the fight against a greater threat to both browsers – Microsoft Internet Explorer. Firefox, together with Chrome, will account for 40 to 50 percent market share. Internet Explorer has been dominating the web browsers market for the past 15 years.
The new deal is sweet for Mozilla as 84% of its revenue, approximately $100 million of a total of $123 million was the income for 2010 from the previous agreement with Google. The previous agreement expired in November. Financial terms were not disclosed. Mozilla will continue to use Google as the search engine from the search box in Firefox. A portion of the revenues coming from those searches goes to Mozilla.