Mozilla Is Not a Google Competitor, but It's Not a Partner Either

Mozilla and Google have an interesting relationship. On the one hand, Mozilla depends on Google money to survive. On the other, Google is working on Chrome, a Firefox competitor that now has roughly the same market share as the open-source browser.

This apparent competition spurred suggestions that Google would stop funding Firefox's development.

That hasn't happened, quite the contrary Google started paying Mozilla three times as much as before for the privilege of being the default search engine in Firefox.

This raised questions as some asked why would Google pay so much to fund a competitor. What they failed to realize is that Mozilla is not a Google competitor.

Google itself would tell you, Mozilla is actually a partner. One of Google Chrome's founders, who worked on Firefox before that.

Peter Kasting wanted to set the record straight and objected to people using the term competitor. In his view, both the Chrome team and Mozilla want to make the web better and they do that by collaborating, even though they don't always have the same views.

"Like Google, Mozilla is clearly committed to the betterment of the web, and they're spending their resources to make a great, open-source web browser," he explained.

"Chrome is not all things to all people; Firefox is an important product because it can be a different product with different design decisions and serve different users well," he added.

The idea is that when the web grows and evolves, so does Google and its revenue. It's the reason why it created Android and made it available for free as well.

Of course, the view got its fair share of critics, accusing Kasting of either just following marketing orders or being too naive. He has replied to that arguing, again, that he and most Googlers really do want to make the web better and that is what motivates many of them.

To which degree Google is actually succeeding in doing that is debatable. Believing in something doesn't automatically make it true.

And Google didn't agree to pay Mozilla the amount of money it did because it was funding a partner, it did it because a real competitor, Microsoft, would have benefited otherwise. That said, Mozilla would rather be taking Google's money than Microsoft's.