2011 was a very bad year for Mozilla Firefox. If it had not been a non-profit company, one might have been able to say that profits went down. Market share certainly dropped and talent jumped ship. But the biggest threat – at least one that many analysts foretold – that Google would not renegotiate it’s search partnership with Mozilla – did not come to fruition. And that was very fortunate, especially considering that the Google Search partnership represented 85% of Mozilla’s overall revenue, according to a report from Search Engine Journals, David Angotti.
Assuming this is true, it must have been a huge relief to everyone at Mozilla when Mozilla’s CEO Gary Kovacs announced that Google had renewed the contract for another three years. At the time of the announcement, terms of the agreement weren’t released to the press and most analysts speculated knowingly that the new terms would be far less than the $100 million paid in 2010. When the news finally came out that Google in fact had actually trippled their price, guaranteeing Mozilla $300 million over the next 3 fiscals, the gobsmacked analysts had to wonder what made the search engine giant do it. And whoever ultimately had a hand in these negotations at Mozilla certainly deserves a huge bonus for helping to keep the non-profit icon around for at least a few more years.
Mozilla released an infographic recently to paint a rosey picture of Mozilla and what they accomplished in 2011.
Mozilla 2011 Infographic – Click to See Full Image
Problems with popular long time favorite add-ons used by SEO professionals, and increased frequency of Firefox browser crashings on after the new upgrade in the latter half of 2011 caused many stallwart users of the Mozilla Firefox platform to not only jump ship to other more ‘reliable’ browsers such as Opera, but also caused some users to actually ‘uninstall’ the troublesome Firefox browser from their systems altogether.
Once the darling of all ‘high-tech’ users – Mozilla Firefox has managed to lose it’s luster. Perhaps the temporary protection from the grim reaper offered by Google’s incredible search partnership terms, $300 billion per year for 3 years, will allow Mozilla Firefox to fix it’s problems, rehire lost talent, and regain it’s feet as the preferred browser for the technically inclined user.
Perhaps the new version which is 7 x faster than the old version and uses less memory will fix all the niggling problems and will entice long-term users back into the fold. Or maybe just seeing this rosey infographic will do the trick. We’ll see…
INFOGRAPHIC CREDITS: MOZILLA
Mozilla 2011 Infographic – Full Image
