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.
> Mozilla chose not to go with Google because Google wasn't willing to pay what they were before.
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.
Economically, all the options - including a renewed Google deal - were stronger than the old Google deal. (This contradicts "Google wasn't willing to pay what they were before.")
Is there any monetary reason to pick many search providers instead of just Google? This is possible, your guess is as good as mine. Regardless, I believe that not going with Google is a very sound strategy. If Mozilla has the choice between an alliance with a competitor with overwhelming firepower and whose clear interest is making Mozilla obsolete and an underdog with an interest in growing along with Mozilla, why pick the competitor?
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").
It's worthwhile to note that Yandex are, in principle, also a competitor. (They ship their own branded version of Chromium; I'm not sure what level it's built at, whether it's just a different theme and some minor additions, or built from scratch on the Chromium Content API. It is, however, frequently out of date and with known security issues, le sigh…)
I also see FirefoxOS as Mozilla's long-shot hedge against the spectre of walled gardens. With first iOS and then WinRT disallowing third-party browsers, a world dominated by locked-down platforms would be a death sentence for Firefox.
I always wondered why no one tried lawsuit on that topic in Europe for iOS devices? It is arguably worse than the IE situation (you used IE just once to get a real browser), but right now Safari is only game in town for no technical reason and everyone is cool with that. No addons, no adblock ...
They straight up told Mozilla this 3 years ago when they signed the billion dollar contract; Mozilla had 3 years to become profitable
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.
Philosophy doesn't put food on the table, so I have no doubt that this deal was motivated by more than a desire to increase choice. But that doesn't necessarily mean that philosophy and financial strategy are in opposition, or that decisions cannot be sought which strike a balance between both (although generally I wouldn't begrudge them if they favored the latter; see my first sentence).
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.
If they can successfully juggle marketing a good 'party line' and be holding onto their core values and be looking out for their bottom line all at the same time, then I have much more confidence in Mozilla's long term viability going forward. Mozilla's continuing existence is of huge importance to the free and open internet, and this announcement certainly gives me hope that they will do so for at least several more years. Good on them!
> 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.
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.
> Don't forget that Chrome users are more tech savvy on average than Firefox users
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.)
I don't doubt that Chrome has a lower (real or, even moreso, measured) CTR, I just doubt that its particularly because Chrome users are more tech savvy.
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.
Anecdotally my experience has been quite the opposite. I know a few developers who primarily use Chrome, but besides that the rest are people that heard it was faster, or installed it by mistake as part of a bundle.
I actually don't disagree with this. Even though I'm a pretty tech-savvy Firefox user (and by "tech-savvy", I mean "seasoned Unix administrator and backend programmer"), "Mozilla" is also a household name among plenty of less-tech-savvy folks; I've seen Firefox (often called "Mozilla" or "Netscape" by its users, amusingly enough) everywhere from the most high-tech web development shops to computers owned/operated by seniors and running Windows XP and dial-up internet. Chrome hasn't had that level of adoption yet; while it's certainly popular among the tech-savvy, it hasn't trickled into ordinary households quite the same way as Internet Explorer and "Mozillafire Netfox" have.
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.
Even a large difference in CTR wouldn't necessarily say anything about being "more tech savvy". A sub 0.2% difference between Firefox and Chrome is therefore meaningless in this context. That's making the heroic assumption that Chitika Insights data is not biased in some way and can overcome methodological problems (no script, user agent changes, bots clicking ads) even if it was perfectly representative.
You may be right (hint) - but that doesn't change the outcome and why Mozillians are retweeting that it enables choice. It actually does.
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.
> They paid Firefox $300mil a year for three years
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.
There's a difference between the Mozilla Corporation and the Mozilla Foundation. The latter owns the former. Revenue for the former is not revenue for the latter, though dividend payments from the former to the latter are revenues for the latter.
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.
Technically, a not-for-profit taxable subsidiary. (That makes a difference because the company purpose of Mozilla Corporation is still not to make money/raise shareholder value, despite the fact this it is fully taxable like any other company).
Isn't the purpose of Mozilla Corporation exactly to make money which inures to the benefit of its sole shareholder (Mozilla Foundation), making it just like any for-profit company except that it happens to be owned by a nonprofit?
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.
Mozilla Corporation is a taxable entity owned by the non-profit Mozilla Foundation. The tax system in the US apparently doesn't take kindly to non-profits funding open-source projects because they "can" be used commercially. e.g. https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2014/07/open-source-madness
$300 million revenue with ~1,000 employees is about $300,000/employee. Pretty good but no guarantee of profitability.
Mozilla Corporation--the wholly-owned subsidiary of the Mozilla Foundation and that has gutted Mozilla into a support community that's as organic and empowered as the support communities for any other pseudo-grassroots company--is absolutely a for-profit company.
> 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.
Given his comment i can say he works for Mozilla or worked for Mozilla or have good contacts there. What he wrote is 100% truth as far as I'm concerned. (i have good friends at Mozilla myself and that echo their exact words from 3 y ago)
Funnily there's noone who actually can be verified as a Mozillian to back it up, heh. Would be hard given that it contains several nonsensical statements. Why on earth would Google care whether Mozilla is profitable? Are there really a lot of people that thought Firefox OS would generate significant income in one of the most competitive markets so fast (I'm sure some people wished, but realistically)? And you honestly don't understand that modally forcing a search provider choice on first run drives nontechnical users away?
Oh hey a throwaway account, what a coincidence.
I'm calling bullshit on this one. Totaly, utter, bullshit.
If Mozilla didn't "pick Yahoo! to enable choice", why didn't Yahoo pay for default search placement in all regions? Russia, China, and other countries will have different default search engines.
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.