The search giant will pay just under $300 million per year to be the default choice in Mozilla’s Firefox browser, a huge jump from its previous arrangement, due to competing interest from both Yahoo and Microsoft.
Market Share:
Mozilla’s Firefox has earlier been reported that its market share dropped to 26.59%. Microsoft’s IE also dropped to new low of 40.92%. The latest information on market share for web browser (according to stat counter) stands at:
- Microsoft’s IE – 40.92%
- Mozilla’s Firefox – 26.59%
- Google’s Chrome – 24.3%
- Apple’s Safari – 5.77%
- Opera – 1.77%
- Others – 0.65%
Business Model:
The business of model of Firefox has long be subjected to many guesses and industrial debates. How can a company like that survive and yet able to keep up to date with latest trends and regularly provides software updates ?
By default, Firefox is a free and open source software. Most of it is tri-licensed under the Mozilla Public License (MPL), the GNU General Public License (GPL) and the GNU Lesser General Public License (LGPL).
Like most open source software, the brand name Firefox is trademark and is owned by Mozilla Corporation. The fate of open source software has always been a roller coaster one .
Take MySQL for example, its eventual fate was to be acquired by Sun Microsystem and later by Oracle. Other notable and common open source revenue making activities include :
- Technical supports.
- Technology consultancy.
- Enterprise edition subscriptions.
- Proprietary license for full features.
- Advertisements.
- Alliance with other software.
