14 DAY TRIAL // Mozilla has now released its annual "The State of Mozilla" report for 2009. Never mind that it's almost 2011, that's how things move at Mozilla. The foundation provided several metrics to gauge its success, including the number of users - 400 million for Firefox - and revenue - $104 million in the last year.
The report covers quite a lot of ground, both relating to Mozilla and to Firefox specifically.
The Mozilla Foundation operates as a non-profit and oversees all Mozilla products and initiatives. However, product development is managed somewhat independently. The Mozilla Corporation is the for-profit organization, owned by Mozilla Foundation, which oversees the development of Firefox and other internet-related products.
Revenue for Mozilla, as a whole, saw a significant rise in 2009 from the previous year. Mozilla brought in $104 million last year, up from $78 million in 2008, a 34 percent increase.
Mozilla's long-term investments only added to $104,000 in loses last year as opposed to $7.8 million in 2008.
The majority of its revenue comes from the search box in Firefox. The company has deals with all the commercial search providers that come bundled with the browser, Google, Yahoo, Yandex, Amazon, eBay and others.
Note that the list of search providers varies depending on the language used in Firefox. Yandex for example is the leading search engine in Russia and is the default for that locale, but is not available for most other languages.
While Mozilla lists several partners, Google still represents the biggest contributor. 86 percent of the search royalties in 2009 came from Google, compared to 91 percent in 2008.
With Google now building its own browser which is getting close to 10 percent of the market in some places, there are worries that Google may back out of the deal with Mozilla. The current deal with Google continues throughout 2011.
That's unlikely for the foreseeable future for a number of reasons. Firefox is still significantly more popular than Chrome and makes Google quite a lot of money from the searches originating in Firefox.
What's more, the company has always focused more on market share than on how it attains it. While Android devices compete with Apple's iPhone, Google is the default search provider for Apple's devices as well.