ReadWriteEnterprise

Over the last three years, an average of 85% of the Mozilla Foundation's revenue has come from search engine partnerships, most importantly from deals that enable the Firefox browser to use its search bar to use Google by default. Though Mozilla's relationship with Microsoft's Bing has grown strangely closer over those years, Google - the maker of the competing Chrome browser, which was created using much of Firefox's braintrust - has remained the principal search tool for Firefox. That tool alone, one analyst said last year, may be responsible for just over 9% of all Google searches.

The last partnership extension between Google and Mozilla - a three-year deal renewed in August 2008 - was apparently allowed to expire last month. This led journalists including my friend and colleague at ZDNet, Ed Bott, to wonder whether Mozilla had any kind of Plan B. Today, we're being told that something resembling a Plan B (or C or D) may be in the works.