Google and Mozilla in bed together for another 3 years

Recently Mozilla announced that it just renewed an agreement with Google that it will be assigning Google's search engine as Firefox's default. This agreement has been extended until November 2011.

Now if you are wondering how dependent Mozilla is on Firefox just look at the financial records for Mozilla from the 2006 tax year - around 85% or $57million came from Google.

Now their formal CEO has committed Mozilla to remaining independent and that if their relationship with Google threatens this in any way they will walk away from the millions it collects. Read more here.

Mozilla has come under some criticism from users with some names like 'Googzilla or GoogleFox' been thrown around but Baker still defends the position and claims that the community will always come first for Mozilla and that there are other ways to generate money.

From my perspective I don't see this as a bad thing or something that threatens Mozilla, if Google started to dictate conditions to Mozilla then it could be different. In the 2 years since the first deal with Google, Mozilla's market share has increased from 11.8% to 19.2% (article here)

So now on something slightly different, Microsoft has bought out the shopping comparison site Ciao for a sum of $486million. This is a mainly UK shopping comparison and review site that receives 26million people a month. This move has received some criticism and people are wondering why Microsoft did this? Ballmer has set aside $1.2billion per year to play catch up on Google, wouldn't this money have been better spent replacing the Google Search Engine on Mozilla's Firefox with Live Search?

If Firefox has almost 20% of the market share I would definitely think that getting that contract would have been far beneficial. I'm not sure what the anti-competitive people in the USA would have thought about that move though...

In case you wondering or you just don't know - users can change the default search engine on Firefox to a rival site if they wish too.