The Justice Department’s proposal to force Google to rein in and even sell off its Chrome browser business may seem like a win for competitors such as Mozilla’s Firefox browser. But the company says the plan risks hurting smaller browsers.
In their recommendations, federal prosecutors urged the court to ban Google from offering “something of value” to third-party companies to make Google the default search engine over their software or devices.
The problem is that Mozilla earns most of its revenue from royalty deals—nearly 86% in 2022—making Google the default Firefox browser search engine.
"If implemented, the prohibition on search agreements with all browsers regardless of size and business model will negatively impact independent browsers like Firefox and have knock-on effects for an open and accessible internet,” Mozilla says. “As written, the remedies will harm independent browsers without material benefit to search competition.”
Just out of curiosity, where does the 20% estimate come from?
It’s half exaggerated and half true.
Last year, there was some breakdown of Mozilla earnings circulating on the web and I vaguely remember them gaining like 600 or 800 millions (mostly from Google) while only spending something around 200 millions for software dev, and this was in 2022 (their revenue from Google increases each year for some reason). That’s 33% to 25%, so it’s either 66% or 75% of Mozilla revenue used for god knows what.
Thank you for that breakdown. I’m a big fan of Firefox, but have been aware of there being issues with Mozilla for some time now (albeit from the periphery). I figured when these cases came against Google, that even though I generally supported the breakup of the monopoly, I knew that a story like this one would eventually land.
If Mozilla is indeed burning money instead of putting the majority of it towards Firefox and, to a lesser extent, Thunderbird, then yeah, they’re going to need to reassess their budget and where to allocate their assets as without big moneybags Google forking over the funds, it’d be within their best interests to really invest hard into making their browser better.
Thanks again.