I found an article today on Tom’s Hardware that just made me think. Looking at how Google views their products, the adaptation of the world wide web, and more than that…Cost benefit analysis.
The obvious idea behind this move is Google’s interest in capturing those advertising revenues generated by Mozilla’s25 percent browser market share and users who are using the box for Google searches. Some rumors suggest that the price for Firefox went up as Microsoft was bidding for the space as well and Google certainly has no interest to handing those search revenues to Bing.
The problem, of course, is Firefox is a rival for Chrome is this respect as it is cheaper for Google to harvest search revenues through Chrome than pay Mozilla. As long as Mozilla has substantial market share that makes economic sense for Google, there is no reason to believe why Google would be dropping Mozilla. However, Chrome developer Peter Kasting does not quite agree and complained that people do not understand why Google is developing Chrome and why Google is supporting Firefox. According to Kasting, Chrome is much more Google’s donation to the world, a welfare project if you will, than a tool that generates revenues.
Kasting argues that “the primary goal of Chrome is to make the web advance as much and as quickly as possible. That’s it. It’s completely irrelevant to this goal whether Chrome actually gains tons of users or whether instead the web advances because the other browser vendors step up their game and produce far better browsers. Either way the web gets better. Job done. The end.”
To continue that thought, Mozilla also aims to make the web better. And since Chrome “cannot be all things to all people”, Google needs to fund Mozilla as Firefox “is an important product because it can be a different product with different design decisions and serve different users well.” Kasting concludes his thoughts with the notion that “Google succeeds (and makes money) when the web succeeds and people use it more to do everything they need to do.” One may wonder where all the advertising business fits into this argument, as Chrome is actually tied directly to advertising via its instant-search engine supported via the location bar.
