Firefox developer Mozilla has announced a new wave of task losses, and the shipping company attributes its money to the Coronavirus. However, the company faces a much larger monetary iceberg on the horizon: the possible end of its critical search according to Google.
Mozilla Corporation announced 250 tasks across the company yesterday, and CHIEF Executive Mitchell Baker said in a memorandum that “COVID-19 has accelerated desire and amplified the intensity of those changes.”
However, Mozilla may face even greater monetary unrest in just a few months if it renews its lucrative search contract with Google.
Mozilla announced in November 2017 that Google had returned to the default search engine for Firefox in the United States and other territories around the world. It was a three-year deal that will expire this fall. The inability to participate in a new study agreement with its biggest rival could, through Mozilla’s own admission, have a massive effect on Mozilla Corporation’s finances.
Mozilla’s most recent annual report states that “most of Mozilla Corporation’s revenue is generated through global browser search partnerships, an agreement negotiated with Google in 2017.”
However, Mozilla is now in a much weaker trading position than when the last deal was reached 3 years ago.
When the last agreement was reached in November 2017, Firefox had 11.4% of the position of the desktop browser market, according to NetMarketShare figures. Now, this percentage of market position has been significantly reduced to just 7.8%, and Firefox is likely to be the maximum likely surpassed by Microsoft’s Edge browser before the end of the year, wasting its position as the most used browser at the moment on the desktop. Google is ahead with a 68.8% percentage.
In the much larger cellular market, Firefox is irrelevant. Its market share of 0.7% (still from NetMarketShare) leaves it in seventh place, miles from the uncontrollable leaders Chrome and Safari. Firefox’s commercial hand is not strong.
If Google didn’t want Firefox’s d smaller search traffic, could Mozilla participate in a search agreement with one of Google’s rivals?
Before Google returned as the default search engine in 2017, Mozilla had a deal with Yahoo. However, as Mozilla’s annual report notes, the termination of the agreement “was the subject of a dispute that the parties resolved in 2019.” Yahoo is unlikely to line up to take its place.
The only other search engine with significant monetary resources is Microsoft’s Bing, but would it really be of interest to Microsoft to its closest rival on the desktop? That’s still unlikely.
This leaves Mozilla in the hope that Google will renew its search contract or locate some other way to fill the huge monetary hole that would create the end of the deal. Mozilla introduced the payment option this year, adding Mozilla VPN to $4.99 according to the month.
In a statement published yesterday, Baker said he was looking for other profit generators. “Recognizing that the old style in which everything was loose has consequences, we want to explore a variety of other trading opportunities and price exchanges of choice,” he writes.
“How can we, or others who want a greater Internet, or those who think that another balance deserves to exist between the social and the public, to gain advantages and personal gain, to offer an alternative? We want to identify those other people and succeed in We want to be informed and expand other tactics to ourselves and create a business that is not what we see today. »
Mozilla declined to comment when asked if it was imaginable for Google to renew its search contract and whether an imaginable termination of the agreement had been taken into account in yesterday’s announcement. The next few months can be very tense.
I’ve been a generation and editor for over 20 years. I was deputy editor of the generation segment of the Sunday Times, editor-in-chief of PC Pro mag and
I’ve been a generation and editor for over 20 years. I’ve been assistant editor of the Generation segment of the Sunday Times, editor-in-chief of PC Pro magazine, and have written for more than a dozen other publications and Internet sites over the years. I have also given the impression of being a specialist in the generation of radio and television, adding BBC Newsnight, Chris Evans Show and ITN News at Ten.
Hit me if you have a story of a generation that you want to publish on [email protected].