Firefox millions - now only 9 per cent Google free

Perhaps M$ will buy them out....

It's an easy way to recover a massive part of the browser market.

It'd also give the Chocolate Factory a slap in the mush!

What is the big deal?

I mean, advertising revenue ... it's hardly money out of my pocket, is it? The adverts don't mean anything to me anyway ... and if they're funding my free blogging, free video hosting, et al ... what the hey?

If they take on and get rid of Microhoo, that's a bonus ... and they're funding Firefox, so what's the big whoop? They're actually spreading the wealth.

I'm in control of where my money goes, not them; I'm in control of whether I choose cloud computing (not at their prices) ... and as the open source arena is opening up, it isn't as if Google will own Open Source, is it?

I mean ... someone educate me here .. what exactly IS the risk? Google can't be daft enough not to realise that becoming another Microsoft is the kiss of hatread and ultimately, death by the next revolution ... can it?

I've always paid

I used to pay for Opera when they charged, and I've given a fiver to Mozilla for each machine I've added Firefox to, and a tenner for Thunderbird.

I think we should pay for FLOS software when it is possible to pay the developers

@WSM

" the advertising company that is Google was bound to attempt to thwart its development".

I'd hardly call investing 90% of income as thwarting.

If it didn't get the money from Google, do you think it would even be around?

I've said many times before, Firefox is simply a way of Google attacking Microsofts online products. Anyone who thinks it's done for the end users benefit is truely deluded.

It's all about the money, dear.

Google Chrome OS done for the poor suffering end user, give me a break, it's about shoving revenue to Google, who do PLENTY of evil, they are just good at hiding it with slimey, marketing puppets.

Re: Perhaps M$ will buy them out

Actually I don't agree that MS wouldn't want to pony up some dinero to Firefox/Mozilla. After all if Bing gets put in as the default FF search engine then they're not only able to squeeze some more Bing users out of the FF community, but it's also helluva good PR to use against the 'my way or the highway' accusations frequently levelled against MS.

Just as long as the exec who proposes it to SteveB remembers to put on plenty of protective gear...

(Icon as a nod to the Big Brother that is the MVCF)

Where to start?

With MS not an option and Yahoo out of the picture where do you start?

How about the other search engine? "Start Page"

http://www.startpage.com/

Title

"With Yahoo! out of the picture, who does that leave?"

Wolfram Alpha? Oh, yeah, okay...

Microsoft will fund Firefox eventually

I don't agree that Microsoft wouldn't fund Firefox - remember that Microsoft has a long history of funding "competitors" for its own strategic interests. Microsoft bailed out Apple so much that to this day Microsoft employees get the Apple employee discount!

Ultimately MS needs to push Bing versus Google way more than it needs to push IE versus Firefox - basically, the world has moved on: a rival browser is only really a threat to Microsoft if it's closely associated with a full-stack competitor like Google, as Firefox currently is.

I'd expect MS to choose a big, loosely regulated market (Latin America?) and pilot Bing-Firefox integration there first...

Owning the competition

When MS bailed out Apple in the 90s, saved them from bankruptcy and made Office and IE available for it again, everyone cried foul as MS were only doing it to create a credible competitor and get the courts off their back.

Well surely this is no different to what Google are doing now with FireBadger? They have Chrome and Chrome OS, so why do they have any interest in Firefox? It's been clear for years that they have no interest in FF, yet still they feed it millions.

Isn't this just a measure to establish a strong rival so that no one can moan that Chrome and the OS are as bad as Windows, if not worse?

God help Mozilla if Google no longer have a strategic reason to keep them afloat. The next phase will be to swiftly get all the FireBadger users over to Chrome, and with it getting ever more bloated and slow, people may migrate more easily than you might think.

After so many years of nerds arguing over the precision of rendering engines, perhaps we're now approaching the point where none of it matters anymore - They all render well enough to do the job, meaning speed and adaptability are more important. Google and Apple have already chosen WebKit and Opera are doing well with mobiles and other gadgets. So where does that leave Firebadger without Google's money on tap?

Google won't do anything stupid

Selling search advertising is Google's core business - browsers and OSes are just sidelines (which don't bring in the profits). I'm sure Google would do a deal with Microsoft to be the default search engine in Internet Explorer if they got the chance.

And if Google ceased to support Firefox, that would hurt Firefox but it would also hit Google at the heart of its business even while it benefits the Chrome team. It's better for Google to have every Firefox user go to Google for search, than to kill Firefox and have a sizeable proportion of its users swap to IE (which isn't really that bad these days) and find their way into the Microsoft universe.