Sebastian Anthony from Extreme Tech explained how browsers make money, and Firefox being the most popular browser, generated 97 percent ($104 million) of its revenue from royalties paid from the Firefox search box, out of which 86 percent ($85 million) came from Google alone. Now, if Google does not renew its contract with Firefox, then it could be a direct challenge for Microsoft’s Bing as well as for Firefox in the browser wars.
You can download Firefox with Bing from FirefoxWithBing.com.
Yet, Microsoft wasn’t pleased about it, and were looking forward for an alternative. In a blog post, Microsoft announced that it has teamed up with the Mozilla team to release a new version of Firefox with Bing, which includes Bing as the default search engine. Well, don’t get too excited about that. This will be released as a separate version along with the default version which is powered by Google search.
It’s just that there are two same versions of Firefox with a different search provider. In other words,Firefox with Bing is exactly the same as normal Firefox. The new version will receive security and version updates at the same time as the normal Firefox.
According to the Bing team, the Bing powered version of Firefox has something called “AwesomeBar” – where you can type in URLs (Web addresses) as well as search queries. Perhaps Microsoft wasn’t aware of it that this feature has been already available in the previous versions of Firefox and is also available in every other browser. Needless to say, Microsoft has always been into this – replicating ideas and giving it another name.
Something to note – In November 2011, Mozilla’s contract with Google will expire. However, we aren’t sure if the contract will be renewed or Mozilla is just going to dump Google. Or it could be the other way round also.
For Mozilla, the partnership with Microsoft is certainly a good deal. Firefox is still the most popular browser, however stats indicate that it is slightly declining month-by-month, but on the other hand, Google’s Chrome is gaining popularity progressively. This, however, makes me think that Google might not be interested in renewing their contract with Firefox.
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