Mozilla Raking in Millions?

truthsearch writes "Internetnews.com wonders about the money Firefox is making in revenue thanks to Google. From the article: 'Mozilla gets paid a publicly undisclosed amount for each Google search query made from Firefox by a user.' This revenue is used to pay the recently formed Mozilla Corporation's 40 full-time equivalent employees and fund project and infrastructure development."

Help them make more...

[The Hobo]

By using this link [google.com] to get to the story ;-)

Interesting to note the default "google" keyword for the address bar puts the sourceid=firefox in there

As an aside, for those who want to make their own custom keywords (and don't know how to), here's an example: Bookmarks->Manage Bookmarks, click on any of the bookmarks under "quick searches", click new bookmark (top left), I made one for acronyms using acronym finder.

Name: Acronym Finder
Location: right click here, copy link location, paste (/. chews up the link) [acronymfinder.com]
Keyword: af
Description: You can put whatever you want here, it's optional

Then you click ok. Now when in firefox you can just search for acronyms by typing af + the acronym, for example: af HTTP

For other websites that use a link similar to the acronymfinder one, just insert %s where your query would go. In my example it's in Acronym=%s. You can also note the other default quicksearches that already exist (ex. slang for urban dictionary, dict for dictionary.com)

Re:So what?

[TabsAZ]

Yeah this is basically a perfect example of how capitalism is supposed to work really.

Re:Google = "Rich Sugar Daddy"?

[neonstz]

Tetzchner was close to the truth. Apparently, the real sugar daddy is Google.

Opera makes money on user searches too, and they did before they released the free version.

Re:what a dumb article

[Red Alastor]

If you give money to mozilla, you will give to the Mozilla Foundation which is a non-profit. If Google gives money to Mozilla, they will give to the Mozilla Corporation (corporations have less regulations) whose sole shareholder is the Mozilla Foundation.

You can't really object to the Mozilla Corporation saying "Oh, they'll put all that money in the pockets of their shareholders" because the only shareholder they have is a non-profit entity.

The corporation does not disclose how much they make and they pay taxes.

Re:How much ?

[Westley]

While I suspect the grandparent's estimate is high, you've misinterpreted it by two orders of magnitude - it wasn't $0.02 per click, it was 0.02 *cents* per click. Still a lot just for doing a search though.

TFA says "millions"

[john-da-luthrun]

If you RTFA, a Mozilla board member says that the quoted figure of $72 million is too high, but "not off by an order of magnitude".

Re:TFA says "millions"

[gronofer]

Or possibly greater than 7.2 million but less than 720 million.

Re:What's also funny is its really hard to get rid

[Wieland]

I wanted to disable it, because I don't need google (or anyone else) to know I'm using firefox.

Ever heard of UA strings?

GET / HTTP/1.1
Host: www.google.com
User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.8.0.1) Gecko/20060203 Fedora/1.5.0.1-1.1.fc4.nr Firefox/1.5.0.1

Re:Google = "Rich Sugar Daddy"?

[rm69990]

Google has a similar relationship with Opera, just to let you know.

Re:Help them make more...

[megrims]

Actually, you can just right-click an input box on a form and select "Add a keyword for this search..." which will work more easily, especially with post-method forms, unless they've taken the feature out in the newer versions of firefox...

Re:TFA says "millions"

[trifish]

The Mozilla head, Mitchell Baker, said: "the search feature in Firefox [...] generates revenue in the tens of millions of dollars"

That means $10-$99 millions.

Mozilla and Google

[ortcutt]

Well. Mozilla HQ is about practically on Google's campus.

Map of Mozilla HQ [google.com]

Map of Google HQ [google.com]

Re:for profit or non?

[MooUK]

The Mozilla Foundation is non-profit. The Mozilla Corporation is not. The later was created to support the former.

Re:Spend some of that on disable-output-escaping?

[Anonymous Coward]

If you've disabled memory caching in about:config, re-enable it.

Disabling it causes firefox to leak huge amounts of ram.

Re:This isn't the first time

[blackest_k]

A while ago is 23rd November 2004 !! however this link http://news.zdnet.co.uk/0,39020330,39189475,00.htm [zdnet.co.uk] February 28, 2005, 15:10 GMT

"FOSDEM: The Mozilla Foundation's partnership with Google has kept it afloat for the past few months, and is now allowing it to hire more staff"

Seems to suggest that the google deal came through roughly at the same time. however that headline was misleading to suggest google was keeping Mozilla foundation afloat. see

http://weblogs.mozillazine.org/asa/archives/007658 .html [mozillazine.org]

As long as google sticks to gathering information from me only when i use google I am happy enough, it's when you get into alexa type activitys i am not.

http://www.pcanswers.co.uk/tutorials/default.asp?p agetypeid=2&articleid=36703&subsectionid=780&subsu bsectionid=739 [pcanswers.co.uk]

Although Alexa does go hand in hand with the internet archive. (damn conflicts with something I do like)

If your interested in Datamining in general http://www.kdnuggets.com/dmcourse/other_lectures/i ntro-to-data-mining-notes.html [kdnuggets.com] or "knowledge discovery" then that link looks interesting

I like google but they are slipping wtf are all the landing sites doing high in the rankings. you know if google could derank hits based on how quickly someone went back to google after following a duff link it should progressively improve

Re:what's wrong with making money?

[Anonymous Coward]

revenue != profit

Re:Well, if it's this big supposedly

[Myen]

Yeah, the Mozilla Foundation files IRS 990s at least... Can't seem to find anything newer than 2004 of course.

http://www.guidestar.org/FinDocuments/2004/200/097 /2004-200097189-01fa37ef-9.pdf [guidestar.org]
http://www.scroogle.org.nyud.net:8090/mozilla.pdf [nyud.net] (same content as above)

Not sure how that's going to work out with the MoCo spinoff; IANAA so I don't know if a NPO wholly owning a corp would need to report on profits made by the corp or not.

Re:Spend some of that on disable-output-escaping?

[Anonymous Coward]

Clearly, that's an extreme memory leak, one of the worst examples I've heard of. It's obviously a major bug, and you should report how to reproduce it so it will get fixed. No one has ever said that that degree of memory usage is caused by the Back-Forward cache feature, as you're trying to claim.

I'm not claiming anything other than Fx using zillions of megabytes of memory. Truth be told, it was already up to around 200 MB before I left home to put out a fire at work (LDAP on FC3 crashed, turns out it was a HDD failure, blah)...

But I don't care, I just don't. I've closed all tabs but one, and when I got home Fx mem usage was through the roof. I don't know why; was it Fx? Was it an extension? Was it many extensions? Some rogue JS left in memory? In the end (my end, YMMV), it doesn't matter. I don't know how to reproduce it; for me, Fx always stayed below 350 MB until that day, but now I've switched to Opera. Yes, it does tend to eat up a lot of memory sometimes, but it seems that Opera's GC does its job. Now I'm at 100 MB after some more surfing, and I'm curious as to what will happen later.

Re:The point of the article?

[Myen]

Actually, the Mozilla Foundation, as a non-profit organization, does need to disclose it.

For example, for 2004,

http://www.guidestar.org/FinDocuments/2004/200/097 /2004-200097189-01fa37ef-9.pdf [guidestar.org]

Re:Spend some of that on disable-output-escaping?

[iamdrscience]

Huhwhat? I love Opera and it's almost all I use, but it leaks memory like a sieve.

This is true, but when you close Opera it keeps all your tabs and stuff so that when you open it again they're all still there (at least this is how it is by default and I've never known anybody who cared to change it). So, unlike Firefox, if it starts leaking memory to an unacceptable degree, you can just close it and reopen it and you're all set. In firefox, if you tried to do this, you'd lose all the tabs you had open, obviously.

OTOH, trying to close opera when it's blowing 450mb is awful; I generally wind up giving it the old "kill -9".

This is true, when Opera gets real big it's sometimes easier to go into Task Manager (I'm using Windows) and kill the process. More hassle than I'd like, but still better than Firefox. Plus, if I'm just a little more diligent and close/reopen Opera periodically before it gets too big, then it's not a problem.

As far as extensions and what not, I've yet to find a Firefox extension that I wish I had in Opera; and the ones I always install in Firefox are for functionality already included in Opera.

Agreed. Most of the extensions I install in Firefox are to get features in Opera and there are still functions I wish I could have but haven't been written. There are some cool Firefox extensions that give you functions not available in Opera, don't get me wrong, but however cool they are, I haven't found many that provide any great utility in everyday use.

Re:Bandwidth Fairies

[slavemowgli]

Actually, the Mozilla website and all that is hosted by the Oregon State University's Open Source Labs [osuosl.org]. So from Mozilla's point of view, the bandwidth and all that *is* free indeed.

Re:Spend some of that on disable-output-escaping?

[Anonymous Coward]

This is true, but when you close Opera it keeps all your tabs and stuff so that when you open it again they're all still there (at least this is how it is by default and I've never known anybody who cared to change it). So, unlike Firefox, if it starts leaking memory to an unacceptable degree, you can just close it and reopen it and you're all set. In firefox, if you tried to do this, you'd lose all the tabs you had open, obviously.

I've installed the SessionSaver extension, so I can do the same with Firefox. I consider it a good enough remedy to deal Firefox memory leaks that there may be. It should be included as a standard feature and I believe it will be in 2.0.

Re:The point of the article?

[booch]

Excellent leg work! This tells us that in 2004, Google donated $225K to Mozilla. Mozilla also received $4.4 million from search companies for directing people to the search pages. It's not broken down by how much each search company paid, but I think it's safe to assume that it was mostly Google.

Also of note is that the Mozilla Foundation spent nearly all of the money it had at the beginning of the year. In other words, their 2004 budget was just about equal to their assets at the beginning of the year. Which is pretty much what you want from a non-profit.

Re:Spend some of that on disable-output-escaping?

[jsebrech]

That's probably not a leak. You probably grew the scope chain [jibbering.com] by inadventently creating nested closures. I wrote a web app which was sensitive to this, and managed to trim its runtime memory footprint up to 100 megs by being more careful about how I use closures.

Re:So what?

[Spy Hunter]

Some of your wishes are obsolete! Firefox 1.5 already includes Javascript image creation in the form of the canvas element [mozilla.org] (more [abrahamjoffe.com.au], more [agustinfernandez.com.ar], more [ponderer.org]). PNG compression is included. And of course there's also SVG. In the future, there may even be OpenGL [mozilla.org]...