On Thursday, a spokesperson for Mozilla confirmed the partnership had been renewed though declined to go into specific detail on the contract duration and sums of money involved.
A Mozilla spokesperson told us: Mozillas search partnership with Google is ongoing, with Google as the default search provider in the Firefox browser in many places around the world.
More than 90 per cent of Mozilla's funding comes from web search providers that pay for the right to be the default search engine in Firefox in their regions.
Despite the renewal with Google, which essentially guaranteed a continuation of its revenue for the next three years, Mozilla axed 250 of its techies on Tuesday, and shut down its office in Taiwan, blaming the economic conditions resulting from the global pandemic.
The group working on the Mozilla Developer Network the essential bible for web devs and programmers was hit hard, too, as were some of its security, policy, and tooling staffers.
The role reduction and restructuring Mozilla just announced allowed us to adjust our finances to ensure stability over the long term, strengthening our ability to build and invest in products and services that will give people alternatives to conventional Big Tech, Mozilla told us.
C-level executive compensation at Mozilla, including the CEO's, is driven by a number of variables and will be impacted this year, a spokesperson told us.
The more skeptical among you may be thinking Mozilla used the pandemic as cover while it rejigs its workforce to reduce its reliance on Firefox which is thoroughly dominated by Google Chrome on desktop and especially mobile and tries to come up with new products so that it can stay afloat if or when Google turns off the money tap.
On the other hand, with other browsers adopting Chrome's Chromium engine, Google may want to keep Firefox alive as a competitor to avoid yet more abuse-of-market-dominance complaints.
Original article