It hasn’t been a good year for Mozilla and its flagship product, the Firefox browser.
Firefox continues to lose share to Google Chrome. Statistics from Net Market Share show the decline, with Firefox plunging from 25% to 22% and Chrome rising from under 5% to more than 18% during the last two years.
Firefox is now on an accelerated development schedule that has alienated enterprise customers.
One of its key managers, Mike Shaver, left in September. And the deal with Mozilla’s biggest financial backer is in question.
A search partnership with Google has historically been Mozilla’s greatest source of income. In its most recent financial statement, prepared in August and published recently online, the Mozilla Foundation won’t even mention Google’s name: The Corporation has a contract with a search engine provider for royalties which expired November 2011.
Approximately 84% and 86% of royalty revenue for 2010 and 2009, respectively, was derived from this contract.
"We currently have partnerships with a number of search providers that differ by market. Our largest contract, with Google, comes up for renewal in November. We have every confidence that search partnerships will remain a solid generator of revenue for Mozilla for the foreseeable future," the Mozilla Corporation said.
In 2010, 84% of Mozilla’s $123 million in revenue came directly from Google. When the original three-year partnership deal was signed in 2008, Chrome was still on the drawing boards. Today, it is Google’s most prominent software product, and it is rapidly replacing Firefox as the alternative browser on every platform.
With its biggest source of revenue likely to dry up and a platform that is under attack from Microsoft and Google, how long will it take before Firefox slides into irrelevance?
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