Firefox makes money from the in-built search bar in the browser. It gets paid for every sponsored link displayed in the search results when the search bar in the browser is used. See the second question in this link for confirmation. I am bit surprised to see that it made around $50 million in 2005 from this. Also see the blog of chairman of mozilla about 2008 financial results. The revenues are around $80million.
They really deserve it. It is really good business revenue model by being open source at the same time. No wonder how they managed to continuously come up with nice products and features. On the other hand, I appreciate Wikipedia also a lot. It has a very small team which manages the infrastucture. The organization is run entirely on donations. But I sometimes feel pity when they request for money. I could easily make $100 million a year if they place one ad per page. I appreciate their noble intentions.
Today I installed firefox 3.6 after spending a long time with my 3.0. I feel that it had lot of improvements especially the speed. I feel that there is a noticeable difference in the speed. Mozilla claims that there is 3 times improvement in the speed but I cannot quantify that. The responsiveness is also better. However, its consumes 300-400MB of main memory. Overall, I liked the new 3.6 browser.
3 comments:
cool! I have been postponing to update my browser for a long time. I'll be updating it soon then. Thanks ra!
Very interesting. I often google, "how such and such a company makes money..." So basically google is paying for mozilla to run? But what about chrome...? I think firefox better step it up so they can stay in the game. i like firefox, but if google controls the purse strings...
One possibility could be that google does not want to pay that much to mozilla. So, they created their own browser. But I do not think that google is that evil.
Other possibility could be that they wanted to have full control of an environment where their content will be delivered and rendered. There is no need to get acceptance from mozilla for all the features they believe are better. We see today that google websites offer more features in chrome browser than in mozilla/IE. Moreover, they can make it default browser in the upcoming mobile devices like tablets and netbooks. They can do tie-ups with manufacturers than go via mozilla. In summary, they get both technological as well as monetory advantage of having their own browser.
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