Could Google crush Firefox in 2020?
Being financially dependent on your biggest competitor is not a great business strategy. But that’s the situation Firefox-maker Mozilla has found itself in for the best part of 20 years.
Mozilla is fed by the crumbs from Google’s table. $430m of Mozilla’s $451m total revenue in 2018 came from “royalties”, the money search engines pay browser makers to send traffic their way. 91% of that royalty revenue comes from contracts that expire in November this year — the contract to make Google the default search engine in many of Firefox’s biggest markets being by far the biggest of them.
To put it bluntly: Mozilla needs Google’s money. But what if Google decided it didn’t need Mozilla and the Firefox search traffic it sends Google’s way? Could Google really crush Firefox?
Warning signs
There are signs that Mozilla is bracing itself for a financial shock.
The company has — according to Techcrunch — laid off around 70 of its 1,000-strong workforce, after revenues from new products such as the recently released VPN service failed to materialise as quickly as Mozilla hoped.
“You may recall that we expected to be earning revenue in 2019 and 2020 from new subscription products as well as higher revenue from sources outside of search,” Mozilla’s CEO, Mitchell…
