The team at Mozilla is likely breathing easier today. The company behind the free and popular Firefox web browser announced today that it had secured a new three year agreement with Google. The new arrangement will allow Google to remain the default search engine for Firefox during that time period. The financial specfics of the new deal were not revealed.
The previous agreement between Google and Mozilla ended in late November. In early December, the two companies were in negotiations for trying to extend the search engine deal. Mozilla was heavily reliant on Google"s search engine for its money. It admitted earlier this year that it gets 84 percent of its revenues via royalties from its older search agreement with Google.
Indeed, the company launched a new donation page on its web site while the talks with Google were taking place, asking people to chip in to support the development of the free Firefox web browser.
Google, of course, has its own Chrome web browser which, according to one source, has now overtaken Firefox as the world"s second most popular browser (behind Microsoft"s Internet Explorer).