Comments on: Firefox fortune hunters

Mozilla Foundation's browser may be free and open source, but that doesn't keep insiders from cashing in.

[nrlz]

failed to mention one more

This article failed to mention the most direct way in which Firefox is making money. Firefox bundles certain search engines with its search bar and Firefox has business relationships with those companies and gets commissions from them. For example, the eBay search bar generates money for Firefox everytime someone searches eBay using the search bar.

IE's real market share much lower

All the calculation of IE vs. Firefox market share has missed one critical factor: the actual amount of usage of a browser in daily surfing. Most early Firefox lovers like me are more technically prone and keep up with emerging tech trend. These people use browser far more than average folks with IE. For example, my mother-in-law has IE in her computer and surfs web one a day average. My wife and I both have Firefox and we are on and off the net five or six times each every day by average. If consider this factor into calculation of market share, IE may have much lower market share already.

[Ubber geek]

IE in her computer

http://www.analogstereo.com/kia_shuma_owners_manual.htm

[McDutchie]

Above message is patently false

The parent message is misinformation. The only instance of a money-making referral in Firefox that has been shown so far was in the German translation of FireFox 1.0 in which the ebay search engine was linked through a third-party dataminer. This was a blunder on Mozilla Europe's part which has since been corrected. No other versions or languages of Mozilla or Firefox are known to contain any such thing - and since these programs are open-source and popular, it would be discovered in no time if they did.

[nrlz]

Re: Above message is patently false

The eBay plugin was not a "blunder". It was a referral program to generate money for the Mozilla Foundation.
http://www.heise.de/english/newsticker/news/53518

Even Mitchell Baker (Firefox developer) plainly states, "[w]e provide access to search services from a range of sources including Google, Yahoo, Amazon, eBay and others you can see in Firefox. We expect to see some funds come to the Foundation as a result of our integrated search."
http://weblogs.mozillazine.org/mitchell/archives/2004/11/firefox_10_now_1.html

And yes, Firefox is open source and it was precisely the fact that it was open source, which allowed this information to be found in no time. (Found within 7 days since the eBay plugin was changed to the referral link.)