Google Engineer: Mozilla Is A 'Partner' And Chrome's Market Share Is Irrelevant (GOOG)

Last week, Google decided to renew its search bar partnership with Mozilla, effectively keeping Chrome's main competitor, Firefox, in business.

Why did Google do it?

The answer seems simple enough: Google renewed its partnership with Mozilla so Microsoft couldn't swoop in and make Bing the default search engine of choice for Firefox.

But maybe there's more to the story.

Chrome engineer Peter Kasting took to Google+ to "rant" about how misunderstood the transaction really is.

ReadWriteWeb picked up on Kasting's post, which claims that in "funding" Mozilla, Google is "funding a partner," and not a competitor.

Kasting adds that "the primary goal of Chrome is to make the web advance as much and as quickly as possible."

"It's completely irrelevant to this goal whether Chrome actually gains tons of users or whether instead the web advances because the other browser vendors step up their game and produce far better browsers. Either way the web gets better. Job done."

Do you buy it?

Kasting goes on to say that "Firefox is an important product because it can be a different product with different design decisions and serve different users well."

Ultimately, it seems that the success of Firefox is really about ad dollars and driving users to Google, regardless of the "let's be friends" layer on top of the transaction.

"Google succeeds (and makes money) when the web succeeds," Kasting said. "Chrome doesn't?need?to be a Microsoft Office, a direct money-maker."

Source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/businessinsider/~3/8pOjiszRGwg/google-engineer-on-firefox-2011-12

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