Why Chrome and not a better Firefox?
Tiny URL: http://tinyurl.com/5bnf9v
Ever since Google’s Chrome web browser has been released, I cannot stop and wonder why Google choose to do it’s own browser versus enhancing Firefox, especially when it has backed the Mozilla foundation for quite sometime. According to wikipedia, the Google , Mozilla partnership contributes about 85% of the revenues for the Mozilla foundation.
The foundation has an ongoing deal with Google to make Google search the default in the Firefox browser search bar and hence send it search referrals; a Firefox themed Google search site has also been made the default home page of Firefox.
A footnote in Mozilla’s 2006 financial report states “Mozilla has a contract with a search engine provider for royalties. The contract originally expired in November 2006 but was renewed for two years and expires in November 2008. Approximately 85% of Mozilla’s revenue for 2006 was derived from this contract.”; this equates to approximately US$56.8 million
There are several good technical arguments being put forth for Chrome: It’s the future for Google’s war against Microsoft, a platform that has been designed to work with Google’s cloud with web applications in mind versus a typical browser that displays web pages, optimized to perform and fast for web applications. It’s all that and also brings “ease of use” that is common with Google products. However I can’t help but think that there’s something more to Chrome than just technical merit.
Google’s bread and butter is it’s advertising business: Adsense and Adwords that has made “Ads by Google” virtually ubiquitous everywhere on websites including ours! With Firefox, there’s one area which Google can’t control which hurts it’s advertising revenues. That’s Adblock! There are 24 million plus downloaded installations of adblock on Firefox browsers with over half a million downloading the Adblock plus plugin every week! Microsoft has full control over IE and Google wants the same control over browsers that people use to surf the internet. With Firefox, Google will never have complete control. Chrome now starts to make a whole lot of sense from this vantage point.
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September 3, 2008 at 9:29 am
[...] Why Chrome and not a better Firefox? [...]