I like DDG too but I bet thay can't afford to pay Mozilla enough to survive. Google was paying them close to $300 million. Hopefully Yahoo can afford something similar or Mozilla will need to cut back on spending.
Long-term given the switch to mobile where FireFox is almost nonexistent (and to a lesser degree their decline in desktop market share) they may need to cut back if they can't find new sources of funds.
Serious question, what are they burning $300 mil on? AND, if they are getting $300 mil from Google every year, why on earth is it asking me for donations on my Firefox start tab?
To help answer my own question, Googled it. Got this:
great finding .. here's an interesting paragraph[1]
Mozilla entered into a contract with a search engine
provider for royalties which expires November 2014.
Approximately 90% of royalty revenue for 2013 and 2012,
was derived from this contract. The receivable from this
search engine provider represented 66% and 69% of the
December 31, 2013 and 2012 outstanding receivables,
respectively.
According to the NYT they have more than 1000 employees. Usually costs are approximately 2*salary, so assuming $100,000 per developer, we get $200 million, which is what they claim as software development costs. So at least the order of magnitude seems right. I guess the salary and costs are actually less, but there are even more employees.
In general, I find the Mozilla corp/foundation great.
But I dislike what their UI designer did with Firefox and that Aurora theme. Mozilla needs more developers (Rust, Thunderbird would need you), less people that change product designs for the sake of change (Mozilla is not Microsoft).
Aurora on OS X looks much better for me than the old theme. The only thing that bothers me is that they could have been more space efficient, but otherwise I like it.
They also just made slight adjustments to Firefox on Android and I hope they keep them coming because on Android Lollipop Firefox's UI is starting to look out of place.
Yahoo is only in the US. Baidu is now default in China, and Yandex in Russia, likely to have similar deals in place.
So instead of one source of income, they now have 3. And I don't see why people switching their search engines back to Google (with all the Europeans whose defaults don't change AFAIK) would not still generate revenue from Google.
Long-term given the switch to mobile where FireFox is almost nonexistent (and to a lesser degree their decline in desktop market share) they may need to cut back if they can't find new sources of funds.