Does Firefox make money even if I don't use Google as my default search engine?
How does it work anyway? I mean, how does Firefox make money? Are they paid per google search or something like that?
And, do they make money if I use forks of firefox and use Google on them?
And, what are the total number of active users for Mozilla and do the forks account into this count?
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They get paid by Google just to keep existing as a competitor
The same reason MS saved Apple in the late 90s.
That's a common misconception. Microsoft paid Apple so they would drop a lawsuit that accused Microsoft of stealing concepts and ideas from Apple's MacOS and putting them into Windows. Which was ironic because Apple had stolen them from the Xerox Palo Alto research lab previously. Gates anecdotally told Jobs "Steve, it's like I broke into a house to rob it and found out you'd already cleaned out the place".
But it was Apple not Xerox or Microsoft that had put those concepts on the market first and they would've had a strong case. So Gates paid for it to go away and also arranged some cross licensing so it wouldn't happen again.
Was that really a good decision? I mean, would the Government have broken MS up had Apple gone to sh*t?
It was Bill hedging his bets. The antitrust case against MS was huge and scared them shitless. They had seen what had happened to Bell Telephone.
Yes, it allowed Apple to survive and become what it is today.
But, MS was not broken up.