Mozilla have reportedly renewed their search partnership with Google for another three years. Mozilla haven’t disclosed the financial details, but have said that it will be significant and mutually benefit both parties.
The move comes as Mozilla just announced plans to lay off 250 employees, representing about a quarter of its workforce. Mozilla CEO Mitchell Baker wrote in a blog post that the coronavirus pandemic had “significantly impacted our revenue.” In the blog post announcing the changes, Baker wrote that the company would focus on building new products “that people love and want to use,” renew its focus on community, and identify new revenue streams. Mozilla also laid off about 70 people in January.
Most of Mozilla’s revenue comes from search engine companies like Google as well as Yandex in Russia and Baidu in China that pay for their search engine to be the default option in Firefox. Over the past decade, Firefox’s share of the browser market has declined, and in that time, several larger products, such as a Firefox phone, and a Firefox OS, never came to fruition.
There were doubts that Mozilla wouldn’t tap Google for its search engine, with the end of October seeing Firefox offering a “Firefox with Bing”. This of course started rumors that Firefox might use Microsoft as their default search engine, but this in the end, was not the case.
