Mozilla + Google: Browser Wars Are Really Search Wars by Proxy

For a moment, it looked like it might all fall apart. Failing to come to an agreement would cost Google money -- quite possibly a lot of money, as Mozilla's Firefox still edges out Google's Chrome in most measurements of browser usage -- but probably wouldn't have changed the overall trajectory of the company much. Firefox's most likely backup plan -- extending Most Favored Search Engine status to Bing instead of Google -- would have been unthinkable just five years ago, with Mozilla positioning itself as the anti-Microsoft and Firefox as the anti-Internet Explorer. Firefox product head Asa Dotzler also played down concerns over Mozilla's future with Google as hype: I know some of you all have been reading crazy press articles about how Google's going to quit paying Mozilla for Firefox search traffic and I understand that's been unsettling to folks. But in December 2009, after Google's Eric Schmidt famously dismissed privacy concerns by saying, "If you have something that you don't want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn't be doing it in the first place," Mozilla's Dotzler was a lot less happy with the foundation's key partner: