Remember when Mozilla rocked, when they were the underdog, when they made the best browser on the market? What happened? The Mozilla Project, started in 1998, was all about making something that competed with Internet Explorer and pushed the limits of what could be done with a web browser. Never mind that Opera launched their browser a year earlier; what made Firefox catch on was that it was free, meanwhile Opera only became ad-free in 2005. Fast forward to today however and Google Chrome just passed Firefox to become the 2nd most popular browser in the world, the first being Internet Explorer. The bad news doesn’t stop there: Ed Bott from ZD|Net discovered that Google’s financial deal with Mozilla, whereby they paid Mozilla to make Google the default search engine, expired last month. This is important because 84% of Mozilla’s 2010 revenues came from that agreement. Things aren’t looking too good.
But what about mobile? That’s the future, we all know that, but apparently Mozilla didn’t get the memo. Sarah Frier did a piece on the company’s mobile strategy for Bloomberg Businessweek and what she found wasn’t pretty. Last year the mobile team within Mozilla was made up of less than 20 engineers that were considered a separate division. This July, as in less than half a year ago, Gary Kovacs, the CEO of Mozilla, finally made the decision to make mobile a priority for the entire ~ 250 person engineering team. Why? Because it’s one thing for Firefox to go from the 2nd most popular browser in the world to the 3rd, but it’s another thing all together to not even have a presence on mobile. Firefox Mobile for Android has been download just 5.4 million times. There are over 200 million Android smartphones out right now. Add in the rest of the smartphone platforms, and it quickly becomes apparent that Mozilla missed the mobile boat completely.
How are they going to fix their current situation? Kovacs says that he hopes that the company will be able to announce that they’ll be the new default browser on certain devices in February 2012, which is Mobile World Congress time. Work on a new, built from scratch, version of Firefox for Mobile, specifically Android, started in October, though no one has seen it yet.
We wish Mozilla the best of luck, because more competition always equals more innovation.