Why Google Keeps Paying Mozilla's Firefox Even as Chrome Dominates

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Google and Firefox have been friends from the start.

Mozilla, the nonprofit organization that makes Firefox, introduced the web browser in 2004, the year Google went public. Both projects focused on replacing a computing landscape dominated by Microsoft Corp. with an open internet that would be more resistant to centralized control. Google assigned coders to help develop Firefox, which eventually took a 30% share of the browser market; Firefox promoted the Google search engine on its homepage.

Alphabet Inc.’s Google still dominates search. The company has also mostly displaced Firefox in the browser market. Google’s Chrome accounts for about two-thirds of the global market, based on usage, according to data company Statcounter. Firefox’s market share is less than 3% and significantly lower on mobile.

The decline of Firefox has led to an identity crisis at Mozilla. Firefox has long been its flagship offering, and while Mozilla has been working on a range of projects and products to push forward its mission to “ensure the Internet is a global public resource, open and accessible to all,” none has achieved anything close to the browser’s success.

One thing Mozilla does have going for it is a lot of money—more than $1 billion in cash reserves, according to its latest financial statement. The primary source of this capital is Google, which pays Mozilla to be the default search engine on the Firefox home page. Those payments, which started in 2005, have been increasing—up 50% over the past decade, to more than $450 million, even as the total number of Firefox users has plummeted. In 2021 these payments accounted for 83% of Mozilla’s revenue.

This type of deal isn’t unusual in the tech industry. Google pays Apple to be the default search engine on its iOS devices, for instance. But critics say the Mozilla deal makes little commercial sense given Firefox’s dwindling user base. Google had to be aggressive when it was chasing Microsoft, but Microsoft is no longer a serious player in the browser market. It’s Google the government worries about as a budding monopolist, says Chris Messina, a product designer and an early adopter of and prominent advocate for the Firefox browser. “What a great foil for Google to then sponsor a nonprofit competitor that was never quite as good,” he says. Mozilla, Messina adds, has “served its purpose and function as far as I’m concerned, and then stuck around with the spoils that came out of that success.”

The goal of an open internet—a founding principle of Mozilla—is noble, of course. But does it still make sense? You’ll have to read all of Businessweek contributor Noam Cohen’s story to find out. There’s something nostalgic about seeing the Firefox logo, and it seems quaint that a browser could be idealistic. Maybe even quaint that the internet itself had do-gooder dreams.

The headline really says it all: “Why Launch Rockets When You Can Just Fling Them Into Space?”

That’s the approach of company named SpinLaunch Inc., which aims to reduce the fuel burdens of liftoff by, essentially, catapulting things into the heavens. From the story by Bloomberg reporter Siddharth Vikram Philip:

Do experts think this will actually work? Read all about it! You’ll also learn one of the potential inspirations for such a launcher. Hint: It wasn’t in the 20th century. Think steampunk.

You can now buy a mixer with “auto sense,” which makes some sense, because baking requires such precision. Read the Pursuits review of the absolute latest in kitchen appliance technology.

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