Firefox, every mention
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every year 2025 anyone Brendan Eich 26Ben Gilbert 17David Rosenthal 11
Verbatim, from the transcripts: the passages where Firefox comes up
Google Part II: Alphabet (Audio) · Acquired
- ▶ 1:58:03 David Rosenthal Instead, what they do is they decide that they are going to become the primary major benefactor for the new Mozilla Foundation and what would become Firefox.
- ▶ 1:58:37 David Rosenthal But then once Firefox actually gets released by Mozilla and deployed out there,
- ▶ 1:58:44 David Rosenthal The way Google starts supporting Mozilla and Firefox is through paying traffic acquisition costs to them to be the default search in the Firefox browser.
- ▶ 1:59:02 David Rosenthal Firefox is where this all starts with Mozilla.
- ▶ 1:59:34 Ben Gilbert But yes, Google has a long history of paying for distribution of their search engine and the new form that it is now taking is the Mozilla Firefox browser.
- ▶ 1:59:51 Ben Gilbert And by the way, I should say, Google becomes a giant contributor of source code to Firefox.
- ▶ 1:59:59 David Rosenthal So, a couple years, Google's paying Mozilla for default search in Firefox, basically funding Mozilla.
- ▶ 2:00:15 David Rosenthal Firefox engineers at Mozilla to come and work at Google directly, but they position this as like, essentially this is the same thing.
- ▶ 2:00:23 David Rosenthal We are still funding Mozilla and Firefox, just like, you know, you're Mozilla, you can't give these employees, these engineers stock options, like you're a nonprofit.
- ▶ 2:00:32 David Rosenthal How about instead they do the same thing that they're doing, which is working on Firefox.
- ▶ 2:01:36 David Rosenthal This was very clever on Larry and Sergey's part because of course these people doing Firefox are perfectly capable of going and doing another great web browser.
- ▶ 2:02:15 Ben Gilbert They kind of lost faith that Firefox was going to keep the pace and that Firefox was going to stay as high quality of a browser as they needed it.
- ▶ 2:10:50 Ben Gilbert Actually, what happened is it destroyed Firefox's market share.
- ▶ 2:10:55 Ben Gilbert I think the launch of Chrome and the peak of Firefox are right around the same time.
- ▶ 2:11:21 David Rosenthal When Chrome launched in 2008, Internet Explorer had almost 70% market share of browsers, and Firefox had most of the rest.
- ▶ 3:10:45 Ben Gilbert It's basically fourteen billion to the, the Android mobile carriers and OEMs, plus Firefox?
- ▶ 3:10:55 Ben Gilbert I'm gonna guess Firefox is less than a billion, call it somewhere around half a billion-ish.
- ▶ 3:11:12 Ben Gilbert Okay, so let's cut four billion off for Firefox and the other web properties.
Google Part I: Origins of Search. How the Best Business in Human History Happened (Audio) · Acquired
- ▶ 2:45:22 Ben Gilbert They famously did a deal to become the default search engine in Firefox just as it was becoming popular, which served as Mozilla's main revenue source for decades.