Mozilla and Google Sign New Agreement for Default Search in Firefox

Mystery solved.

 

Heh, that should shut some people up.

 

I thought they had already agreed to a new contract in November or something? Perhaps those were just rumors/ the beginnings of talks.

3 more years of funding, we'll see if Google continues to fund next time - I'm not optimistic.

 

I'd like to see Mozilla ink a real deal with Bing, not just the optional agreement recently. MS could rain money upon Mozilla, and if Firefox can keep its market share up, it could help Bing to stop bleeding cash. Not to mention bumping Bing up in search share even more.

 

I reckon that would work.

 

Mhm, plus Google just needs real competition. I don't think Bing can be that competition without more presence.

 

Yes, I was thinking something similar when the rumours were around that Bing may replace Google as the default engine. They may be able to yin & yang each other.

 

We'll see if Bing and Google think Firefox is worth it in 3.

 

Time to look in your crystal ball eh?

 

Oh, I have! But if I share what I see it might not come true.

 

I think his crystal ball is foggy

 

Lol, it can only help Bing, so of course it would be worth it for them.

 

I think he dropped it on his foot.

 

That really depends on IE and Firefox's market shares. It may make more sense for them to not support the competing browser in the hopes that users will move to IE instead. If Firefox is unable to keep users it may not make financial sense to fund it when both companies have competing products. Even if it were to be funded by Yahoo, which does not have a browser, it would almost certainly not be to the extent that Google has been funding it.

But, again, that's dependent on market shares, which I believe will continue to drop unless there's significant changes in Chrome and/or Firefox.

 

Or the reverse, that users would more likely move away from IE to Chrome. In which case it would make more sense to support Fx.

Remember what I said about statistics & Elvis impersonators?

 

Yep, you don't like statistics, I do lol that's fine by me.

I suppose. That doesn't seem very likely to me.

 

Lord, a world in which we basically have IE and Chrome to choose from..that would suck. I believe that's also the reason Firefox is not likely to "die" anytime soon. The best scenario that's likely to happen is the marriage of Firefox and Bing. If I were MS, I'd sign simply because Google is my number 1 enemy/competition. Sure, you might face users switching to or staying with Firefox, but your search engine is the one being used the majority of the time, so it isn't killing you. Plus, if you have to lose some users, better to do it to a company using your search engine, instead of a company who wants everything to their self.

 

I don't think there will ever just be two browsers for very long.

I don't consider this very likely. If Google thinks that it's no longer worth it for them to fund Firefox (and their entire business revolves around search) than I doubt MS will. And even if MS does step in it will be for far less because they know they don't have to outbid Google.

 

We can always hope Opera gets it together, lol. Actually, I would love to see a new company come up with a different browser. I mean, if you really get down to it in Windows, there's only 3 (big time players). I still think MS would have much more to gain by signing up. You're likely right in that MS would sign on for significantly less, but it would be no chump change, and would keep Mozilla going.

Worst case scenario in the short to medium term would be Mozilla has to partner up with some other company or branch out into some other web business to pay the bills. Perhaps Firefox will die someday, I'm no Nostradamus. But I truly believe that would be many years away and only if things got just so bad that there was no way around it.

 

Personally, I'd rather a new browser pops up than Opera.

I want to see a browser do what Firefox did for the web or what Chrome has done, create completely new and blatantly incredible features.

If Firefox manages to maintain its current market share, sure. But if the trend continues (I know I know, math is bad) it won't and it'll start getting less and less money for devs and servers and in 3 years it simply won't make sense for either company to pay it much.

And that money is important. Syncing features, dev time, hosting servers, and just everything else that goes into a huge project.

 

http://www.opera.com/portal/15/years/

 

It's one thing to come up with an idea it's another entirely to popularize it.

The reason I don't want Opera to be that browser is because it's already here. It exists, and the code is established. I want something that isn't restricted by preexisting code that's designed with new features in mind.

 

Lol, math isn't bad. I don't know if anyone could really make things that much more radically different than Mozilla and Google have (beyond security, I'm not all sure what Chrome has done really, besides UI changes and that ghastly "Instant" stuff. Which, by the way, if IE and others copied that too, I probably would log off, lol.)

Opera still has a lot of gas left in their tank, imho. They just need to pull out of the parking lot, which won't happen so long as management keeps up the mess they're making.

 

I also like that Opera makes it sound like the invented tabs haha something many people believe.

Quite a lot. Firefox was the first browser to use a compiler as their Javascript engine but Chrome took that to a whole new level when it came out with its javascript virtual machine - nearly on the same level as Firefox did when it moved from interpreted to compiled javascript. At the time of release Chrome really was noticeably faster because of this.

SSL False Start is another big one, which Firefox implemented before Chrome actually - but it was Chrome engineers that created it.

Omnibox combining search with the url bar.

And security is another biggie.

Sync.

I believe Chrome was not the first to separate tabs though, didn't IE do that first? The sandboxing wasn't nearly the same though and Chrome certainly pioneered the idea.

A few other things as well.