One of our eagle-eyed readers (thanks, Raphael) sent me a note that Microsoft today announced a bingified version of Firefox.
For a brief moment, you could think that Microsoft and Mozilla have fallen in love. Microsoft “teamed” up with Mozilla and created a version of Firefox, which Microsoft describes as a “popular” browser. All right, let’s not get carried away. Calling Microsoft’s kind words “love” is exaggerated, but they are a brief break from the bitch fest between the two companies we are used to otherwise.
So, Microsoft collaborated with Mozilla to come up with Firefox with Bing, which is a special version of Firefox that uses Bing as default search engine. The browser is not offered for download from Mozilla’s website, but the collaboration apparently required Mozilla to announce the browser via its main blog as well. According to Mozilla, the customized browser is a result of the cooperation between Mozilla and Microsoft that was announced about a year ago.
Given the circumstances of the cut-throat-competition in the browser market, it is remarkable that Microsoft would offer a version of Firefox for download from one of its web properties. From Mozilla’s view, it seems to be just a business deal. Having Microsoft promote Firefox with Bing should bring in additional ad revenues. In the end, Mozilla is unlikely to care where its ad money is coming from and some diversification of ad revenue sources isn’t such a bad idea.
As silly as it sounds, there may be a good reason for Mozilla to treat Microsoft nicely in the future as both are now sharing a common threat: Chrome (which was just released as version 15). IE will drop to close to 40% market share this month, Firefox will drop to about 26.4% and Chrome will come close to 25%. Over the past weekend, Chrome climbed past Firefox with 26.85% versus 26.31% share. Mozilla won’t be able to fend off Chrome beyond November. Chrome 14/15 is also about to exceed IE8 as most popular browser overall. Google’s browser has held the position as most popular HTML5 browser for more than half a year. Chrome 14 had more than twice the market share of Firefox 7 and IE9 over the past 30 days.
There may be a time when Microsoft and Mozilla may need each other to battle Google.
Wolfgang Gruener in Business on October 27
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