Mozilla: Open Source Firefox Browser Thrives without Cash from Google

How important is Google to open source? Not quite as important as it was up until a year ago, when Mozilla announced that it was no longer receiving large sums of cash from the search giant. Yet it turns out Firefox and other Mozilla products are still thriving without as much Google support.

Between 2004 and 2014, Google paid Mozilla around $100M annually to make Google the default search engine in Firefox. That deal ended last year, when Yahoo! became the default search engine for Firefox users in the United States.

Mozilla’s recently released 2014 financial report showed about $330M of revenue, a large chunk of which came from Google. That money won’t factor into the 2015 report.

But Mozilla is still doing fine, according to CFO Jim Cook, who said the organization’s finances look to be even better for 2015 than they were in 2014, CNET reported. That’s due to “very strong” deals that Mozilla maintains with other search companies, according to Cook.

The news is notable for two reasons. First, it shows just how shockingly significant default settings are in steering users toward particular services. The fact that search companies will pay hundreds of millions of dollars to have their engines appear at the top of the list in browsers like Firefox underlines just how little thought or analysis people put into the search engines they use. Many of them apparently use a service because it is the default, not because it offers the best features.

Second, it’s notable that Mozilla no longer needs a lifeline from Google to thrive — and Google, for its part, no longer sees its deal with Mozilla as a key way to inject cash into the open source development scene. Mozilla, which makes one of the world’s most popular open source applications, can thrive in its own right.