So Google just said that Firefox 5 and up won’t support the Google toolbar. Ed Bott points out that this toolbar must have been a pretty significant source of revenue for Firefox, whose market share keeps falling while Google Chrome’s keeps rising. Combine with Mozilla’s deliberate pissing off enterprise users with their stupid new versioning policy, and you’ve got to wonder how exactly they intend to survive against Google and Microsoft.
It sounds like Google decided to stop supporting Firefox and not the other way around.
Toolbars are for noobs anyway. Can’t tell you how many times I’ve seen a browser with half the screen (and bandwidth) used up by moronic toolbars…
Firefox will survive as long as there are programmers that want an alternative to the corporate schlock…
Two things:
- Out of the two remaining user input text boxes, both will still perform google searches if people put text in them.
- Who the fuck uses google toolbar these days? Not even technically incompletent people use it anymore.
My mom sent me a panicked email when she updated firefox and her google toolbar went away.
Yes, of course, didn’t mean to imply otherwise.
That’s not the point, the point is that Mozilla heavily depends on Google for its revenue. If Google stops paying they have a problem.
Yes, Mozilla is fucked if Google stops paying them. And it would be bad for Mozilla if that’s what this news was. But it’s not, it’s about some irrelevant toolbar that nobody uses. Firefox’s default search is still going to be Google, and they’re going to continue to get revenue for that.
There’s no crisis here.
I use Firefox heavily but not exclusively, and besides OS installed options, is the second highest use within the enterprise market.
The problem here is that every organization changes. I think we are seeing Google fire back at Mozilla for this strange new version policy, just as you stated. I’m not sure if that dooms them, Chris but I agree it was a poor choice by their team.
Here is the kicker though, the market is rather populated. If this were to kill revenue for Firefox and they took a hit due to that, it’s not like we couldn’t pick up the slack with a different browser. Browsers are nearly like watches now, they all tell the time.
I use(d) the Google toolbar because it incorporated Google Translate functionality. As an English speaker living in a non-English speaking country, having websites I visit automatically translated into English is a huge boon. I can copy and paste text into Google Translate manually of course but having automatic translation as part of the rendering process was super useful.
Yeah, that’s bullshit. Firefox didn’t see any revenue from the google toolbar in the first place, because it wasn’t bundled with the browser. They do see revenue from the “firefox search” default homepage, which uses google, and its use of google as the default search provider. That has not changed, and if google decides not to renew that contract I’m certain that MS will step in with Bing.
Apparently Google Toolbar was bundled with Firefox a few versions ago, and Mozilla did get extra money just for the bundling. It’s true that the absence of the toolbar won’t affect search revenue as such, though.
I don’t really get this. Why would Google be upset about the new versioning? They’re the ones that started it with Chrome.
What does Google gain by sending the 100-kajillion hits they get from Firefox across the street? This sounds more like a Microsoft shill doing a “let’s you and him fight” kinda thing to Google and Mozilla.
Just the toolbar team maybe? It’s just a guess. Otherwise why cancel it?
Try Chrome.
Maybe it wasn’t being used enough to justify the effort of maintaining it, especially on what must be a small, dwindling team.
Really, there’s no reason for any of those toolbars to support anything other than IE6, as far as I’m concerned.
That’s entirely possible, too.
Same, except it was a panicked phone call.
I installed Chrome on her machine, imported all her bookmarks and told her to just use that. Gotta learn to live without toolbars some time.
I have given up on Firefox at this point and all of my machines now use chrome.
Huh, people still use these crappy toolbars?
Chrome has a lot of cool things, but the shitty tab/multitasking support makes it a no deal for serious browsing.