Mozilla Firefox has long been a popular competitor of Google in terms of dominance in the web browser market. It is often considered the only viable popular option apart from Google Chrome, and many people prefer it over Chrome because of a fear of Google’s monopoly. While initially the default search engine for Firefox was Yahoo Search, as Google continued to dominate the market Mozilla changed gears and switched to Google as its default option.

Mozilla’s partnership with Google has been going on for three years now, which means that the initial contract has expired. However, both Mozilla and Google have announced that this contract is going to be renewed. According a Mozilla spokesperson, there won’t be any changes to the fact that Google is the default search engine for Firefox users in the vast majority of countries in the world.

This is clearly a very profitable contract for Google. It also further suggests the dominance of the search engine in the market when a browser that formerly eschewed its search engine in favor of Yahoo’s is now readily renewing contracts not long after they have expired.

One uncertainty here is the length of the contract as well as how much money would be changing hands. Since the last contract was for three years, it would be safe to assume that the new contract would be of a similar length. However, there is also a chance that both parties might have wanted a longer contract of perhaps five years due to this clearly mutually beneficial arrangement. As far as money is concerned, once again no official announcements have been made. However, it is estimated that Mozilla would be paying Google between $400 million to $450 million. This takes the total value of the deal to well over a billion dollars, indicating just how valuable Google is as a service.

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Sources: Theregister // Zdnet.