Can Firefox Surive?

Big changes ahead at Mozilla, the company behind popular search engine Firefox.  The company’s decade-long deal with Google has come to an end.

That agreement paid hundreds of millions of dollars a year to Mozilla and accounted to 90% of the company’s revenue.

Mozilla says that the end of the deal will promote choice and innovation, but it’s unclear if they had a choice in the matter. Google now has its own desktop browser, the Chrome operating system and the Android operating system, they really don’t need to pay Firefox hundreds of millions of dollars per year for exposure.

So, how can a company that provides products for free stay afloat with most of its income gone? Well, they found another corporate giant to help foot the bill.  Mozilla inked a deal with Yahoo.

Yahoo will now be the default search provider for Firefox in the United States.

Firefox tossed out buzzwords like clean, modern and immersive to describe the search page, which looks pretty standard to me. And you can always switch the default browser if you don’t like Yahoo. Mozilla made a point of saying that it refused any terms that demanded an exclusive search engine and that users will still have pre-installed alternatives such as Bing and Google.

Of course, Yahoo is counting on the fact that most people don’t even bother to switch default browsers.

In Russia, Yandex will become the default browser and Baidu will be the default in China.

If you noticed your search provider has changed, that’s why.

~ Cynthia.