How browsers make money, or why Google needs Firefox
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How browsers make money, or why Google needs Firefox
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Re: How browsers make money, or why Google needs Firefox
#2How much does Opera earn with their auctions?
Re: How browsers make money, or why Google needs Firefox
#3How much does Opera earn with their auctions?
Not sure exactly, but its financial doc for 2010 is here:
http://media.opera.com/media/finance/2010/annual-report.pdf
Bottom of page 37 says that Opera made 242,000,000 NOK from its desktop browser, which is mainly from search revenue (about $43 million)
Re: How browsers make money, or why Google needs Firefox
#4Google shouldn't make Firefox their enemy anyway. Together with Firefox they can actually "not care" if Microsoft agrees with new standards or not (like say, WebGL). Together they can push a lot more stuff out there and transform them into standards.
Re: How browsers make money, or why Google needs Firefox
#5Could Firefox change their default search engine to Bing? Without losing users and causing a huge flame war?
I doubt it.
Google should stop paying just to see that flamewar, would be fun.
'Losing' firefox wouldn't be a massive blow, people who use firefox know how to change the default search engine. All that will happen is that they'll be a massive amount of hate directed at firefox for trying to force bing down their throat.
I expect Google to keep paying so they can pretend there's some sort of competition in the search market though. 'But we had to pay for firefox's search box!'.
Re: How browsers make money, or why Google needs Firefox
#6So Google owns Firefox pretty much. That's a bad situation for Mozilla.
Re: How browsers make money, or why Google needs Firefox
#7So Google owns Firefox pretty much. That's a bad situation for Mozilla.
I think the article actually makes the opposite point, i.e. that Google needs Firefox more than Mozilla needs Google.
Re: How browsers make money, or why Google needs Firefox
#8Google shouldn't make Firefox their enemy anyway. Together with Firefox they can actually "not care" if Microsoft agrees with new standards or not (like say, WebGL). Together they can push a lot more stuff out there and transform them into standards.
This one is quite tricky. Google shares Webkit with Apple, so they sure can ram new stuff through that way. Together they control the majority of the mobile market.
The Amazon Kindle reader was a nice example of that, working on Chrome and Safari, but not Firefox, due to competing web-database standards being implemented.
H.264 vs WebM is another one. Google made a lot of noise about dropping H.264 for WebM, Firefox actually did so (because they had no choice, anyway), but Chrome still ships with H.264 support.
So I don't have the impression there are real fronts as far as promoting web standards are concerned. For better or worse.
Re: How browsers make money, or why Google needs Firefox
#9So Google owns Firefox pretty much. That's a bad situation for Mozilla.
I think the article actually makes the opposite point, i.e. that Google needs Firefox more than Mozilla needs Google.
Firefox is bleeding market share as it is. Pulling people's favorite search engine out from under them is only going to goose the uptake of Chrome.
Hopefully Google and Mozilla both appreciate they have more to gain by cooperating.
Re: How browsers make money, or why Google needs Firefox
#10Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think the article actually makes the opposite point, i.e. that Google needs Firefox more than Mozilla needs Google.
Firefox is bleeding market share as it is. Pulling people's favorite search engine out from under them is only going to goose the uptake of Chrome. Hopefully Google and Mozilla both appreciate they have more to gain by cooperating.
On one of my machines I have Test Pilot enabled (Mozilla's opt-in tool to get user feedback), and I noticed it was returning Bing searches by default, followed by a query of "Were these results useful?"
Read into that what you want.