Recently Google announced that with their Adsense program you are able to make money, albeit $1 per referral, by switching folks over to Firefox. The Firefox version you get is bundled with the official Google Toolbar, but that’s not really a bad thing.
Google promoting Firefox is a great leap for the browser, and the standards development community. Hopefully it will help spread Firefox more widely. However, I wonder why Google are doing this.
However, I wonder why Google are doing this… Ben Goodger, the lead developer on Firefox, changed from the Mozilla Foundation for the payroll of Google at the start of 2005. Google also acquired some (four) developers who worked on Microsoft’s Internet Explorer. Google have even registered gbrowser.com, but there is no site at present. There are plenty of rumours about the gbrowser too. I have no doubt that we’ll see a browser by Google by the end of 2006.
It’s highly likely that the browser will run on the Gecko-based engine (behind Mozilla products), so why do they feel the need to push Firefox. Maybe, like a lot of great products which have been released recently, Google are planning on buying out Firefox, like they and Yahoo! have done in the past.
If you want to promote Firefox or want some reasons to switch, check out these sites:
Side note, Firefox 1.0 is one year (and one day) old. (I missed the boat by a day, oops!)
Comments
Matt Brett
Website
Thursday 10th November 2005
Nice - Exploder Destroyer and Kill Bill’s Browser are products of a couple co-workers of mine. Just something to keep them occupied over the weekend. Seen quite a few mentions in the feeds this morning, though - and they were on the front page of Digg yesterday. Good stuff!
Anders G
Website
Friday 11th November 2005
I don’t know, but it is a guess Google are making people more browser-aware in advance of the gBrowser release.
ispiked
Website
Monday 14th November 2005
I don’t know about the whole Google Browser thing… Google pays about 6 people to hack Firefox, but a lot of the stuff they do is stuff that’s really not core stuff, but more like features for Firefox; e.g. one of their guys is working on a new “Places” (http://wiki.mozilla.org/Firefox:Places:Scratch_Pad).
Aakash
Website
Wednesday 30th November 2005
Wow… I didn’t realize how strongly some people felt about getting people off IE, and onto Firefox. On my home computers, Firefox was installed, and we were encouraged to use it, due to potential virus and spyware threats. However, I often prefer IE - partially because it seemed that the interfact on Firefox, when it came to using Yahoo! Mail and Blogger.com, wasn’t as good as IE’s has been. So on this laptop that I have at school, I’ve been consistently using IE.
When these referral programs were added to Adsense, about a month or so ago, I was a little confused by that, but I understand how the Adsense referral feature works. However, I haven’t yet even tried the Firefox referral one. It seems that that one would be more likely to yield money (at least in the short term) than the Adsense referral one… Since doesn’t the Adsense referral thing require someone to use your referral link to enroll in Adsense, and then earn $100, before you get your $100 ? (Though I suppose in the long term, the Adsense referral program could be more lucrative than the Firefox one.)
With the Firefox referral program (which I know is also sponsored by Adsense), do you automatically get $1 for each individual who uses your referral link to download and use the ‘Firefox with Google’ web browser? How much money due you have to earn through that, before they send you your check?
And also, with that referral program, would it be permissable to tell your friends to use your link, to download that browser (so as to earn you money)? I know that Amazon.com’s ‘Associate’ Program allows you to verbally tell your friends - and to even post something online - letting people know to use your referral link, to purchase items, thereby earning you a commission.
But I don’t know if that type of thing would be allowed, for this Firefox referral program.