Firefox developer Mozilla generated substantial income from a sponsorship deal with Google; the search and advertising firm paid Mozilla in return for Firefox making Google its default search engine. That deal was ended last year, with Firefox defaulting to Yahoo in the US, Yandex in Russia, and Baidu in China. See the Mozilla annual report for 2014 here.
Given the prior dependence on the Google deal, this was a big shift for the open source browser developer. Mozilla has just released its 2014 financial report; last year it had just shy of $330 million of revenue, 98 percent of which came from its search deals.
In spite of this, Chief Financial Officer Jim Cook claims that its 2015 performance will be even better, thanks to the new range of “very strong” search partnerships.
In addition to growing revenues, Mozilla still faces challenges breaking into the mobile space. It’s had an Android version of Firefox out for quite some time and recently launched an iOS version, but its market share on smartphones remains negligible.