In a carefully formulated blog post, Mozilla disclosed that the partnership had been renewed for another three-year period. The financial terms of the deal were not revealed, but finalizing the new deal with Google has been seen as historic for Mozilla, a Silicon Valley nonprofit software maker.
Mozilla has posted the following message on its blog:
We’re pleased to announce that we have negotiated a significant and mutually beneficial revenue agreement with Google. This new agreement extends our long term search relationship with Google for at least three additional years.
“Under this multi-year agreement, Google Search will continue to be the default search provider for hundreds of millions of Firefox users around the world,” said Gary Kovacs, CEO, Mozilla.
“Mozilla has been a valuable partner to Google over the years and we look forward to continuing this great partnership in the years to come,” said Alan Eustace, Senior Vice President of Search, Google.
The specific terms of this commercial agreement are subject to traditional confidentiality requirements, and we’re not at liberty to disclose them.
Although the new deal casts out the uncertainty for Mozilla, but the devil is in the details. Without knowing those numbers it is pretty vague whether this is really good news for Mozilla or for millions of Firefox fans.
The previous pact since 2008 between Mozilla and Google, technically expired in November, and earlier this month, the two sides were still negotiating.
Firefox, once the favorite browser for Google, was called as “Googlefox” because of Google’s support, now has competition in Chrome, Google’s own browser. But the overall goal of Chrome is to speed up the Web and improve it as a foundation for applications, not to throttle other browsers off the Internet.
Nevertheless, the deal is good news for Mozilla. In its October State of Mozilla report, the company said that its largest search contract is with Google. Specifically, the search giant makes up 84 percent of Mozilla’s royalty revenues.
“The majority of Mozilla’s revenue is generated from search functionality included in our Firefox product through all major search partners including Google, Bing, Yahoo, Yandex, Amazon, eBay and others,” Mozilla said at the time. “Mozilla’s reported revenues also include very important individual and corporate donations and grants as well as other forms of income from our invest-able assets.”