Mozilla Keeps on Growing

Mozilla has published ^[1] its annual report for the year 2009, which takes a look at how Firefox is doing competitively and financially, along with what is planned for the future, and frankly, things are looking quite rosy for the open source browser maker.

Firefox has more than 140 million active daily users and in excess of 400 million total users. The much delayed ^[2] Firefox 4 will introduce significant performance improvements along with a host of other promising changes. Mozilla is also working on broadening its scope by making inroads into the mobile sector with Firefox (Fennec) for Meego and Android ^[3], and Firefox Home ^[4] for the iPhone.Financially also Mozilla is doing quite well. In 2009, it generated consolidated reported revenues of $104 million, up 34 percent from 2008 reported revenues of $78 million. This includes a $104,000 loss from long term investments, which is again a considerable improvement from previous years figure of $7.8 million. As before, a significant portion of the revenue comes from Google and other partners like Yahoo, Yandex, Amazon, eBay and a handful of others.Mozilla has had a partnership with Google since 2004, and has renewed their contract three times, in 2005, 2006 and 2008. Their current contract is up for renewal next year. Some publications like Silicon Alley Insider ^[5]have already begun dubbing 2011 as the Armageddon year for Firefox based on the apprehension that Google might choose not to renew their contract with Firefox, which is one of the biggest competitors of Google Chrome. However, what they are forgetting is that the search itself is a competitive segment, and Firefox's large user base will provide Mozilla with plenty of bargaining chips. It's unlikely that Google will be too keen to let Bing become the default search engine in Firefox without a fight.