Technology
Even $500 Million a Year From Google Isn’t Enough to Save Firefox
The search giant pays a small fortune to its ostensible competitor, but Mozilla is still struggling to use that capital to fund a second act.
Google and Firefox have been friends from the start.
Mozilla, the nonprofit organization that makes Firefox, introduced the web browser in 2004, the year Google went public. Both projects focused on replacing a computing landscape dominated by Microsoft Corp. with an open internet that would be more resistant to centralized control. Google assigned coders to help develop Firefox, which eventually took a 30% share of the browser market; Firefox promoted the Google search engine on its homepage.