Saturday, December 03, 2011

Firefox - The Phoenix That Might Not Rise ?






Just read an interesting article by Ed Bott  => " It hasn’t been a good year for Firefox. Mozilla has lost share to Google, it’s lost the loyalty of enterprise customers, and it’s lost key talent. And a deal with Google that supplied 84% of its revenue last year was scheduled to end in November. Can Firefox avoid a slide into irrelevance?"


$100mn out of $123mn just from Google itself, that sort of dependence is a dangerous position for anyone to be in. The incentive that Google has to renew the deal is to not let Microsoft come in with Bing and not give any market share points in the process, but with Chrome taking over from Firefox in market share a deal could be made although not anywhere near $100 mn .


Even for Microsoft coming in, it would mean paying to compete with their browser Internet Explorer which they have spent a whole lot on trying to revive. But they do want to make Bing a success as well


Its almost a case of Prisoners Dilemma here and the solution to that one would  be that they both don't do anything and take the chance of splitting the user base between them.


I've been using Firefox since it was called Phoenix and am sad to see this happening, but their recent moves have hurt them quite a bit and not having a presence in mobile is another big problem ( I mean even Opera has a great mobile browser, I use it frequently on the Xoom).


Is this a case of the phoenix not rising from the ashes ?

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