Just a quickie. I’m genuinely confused but I suspect the answer to this will, as usual, be blindingly obvious.
I’ve been reading this article from the Guardian about the anti-competitiveness of Microsoft in the browser market.
Now, I can sort of understand that Google and MS want us to use their browsers as they are set up to point us towards other services that are charged for or include advertising.
But what about Firefox or Opera? Do they get a cut of advertising revenue or something?
How do any of these organisations justify the spend they put into developing their broswers?
Please help me…
6 Comments until now
I believe (but I may be wrong) that the browsers generate income via the little search boxes… every time a user searches with that box, and ads are displayed on the resulting page, the browser developer gets a cut.
Thanks Mark. This makes sense as I can’t see another way they could monetize it.
That’s a really good question, and here’s my attempt at an answer.
Firefox is, and always has been, an open source project – built by the community for the community. The aim isn’t to make money but to improve the user experience of the web. The Mozilla foundation is essentially a charity to support this aim. This may sound noble, but so many large companies are reliant on the web working well that they’re prepared to contribute to help ensure the continuity of the platform on which they’ve built their success. Also, having one great web browser prompts the others (i.e. MS) to improve in order to compete.
Opera, on the other hand, seem to make most of their money selling embedded browsers to device manufacturers. The free products are a loss leader to demonstrate the quality of their products and raise their profile.
The other benefit that I can see is trust. Web browsers are now one of the most used pieces of software, so if yours works well you’re more likely to trust other products from the same company.
Cheers Jez, appreciate the comprehensive response. The amount of altruism evident in OSS does kind of renew faith in the human race!
) But I guess there’s a pragmatic element to it as well. Thanks.
Mark is correct. I’ve done some localisation work for the Flock browser, which may involve changing the search plugins (amazon.co.uk instead of amazon.com, etc.). Part of the testing process at Flock HQ is to test that the search plugins are “monetized”.
Cheers, Steve. Thanks for the inside track! Hope all is well.
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