Currently, Google pays Firefox’s bill by having them set their default search engine to Google.
This will no longer be when Chrome is in the hands of another party. DOJ is currently advocating for this forced sellout.
So will Firefox be no more after that?
Is there even a “before”? The very first release of Firefox was in 2004. Google started paying Mozilla in 2004. The only time there was no funding from Google was 2014-2017. In that time Yahoo took over that part.
There was however the 2 year period from 2002 - 2004 when Firefox was still “Phoenix” which was mostly funded by AOL.
To my knowledge, there is not a single moment in the life of Firefox when it has had to get by completely without external funding. And 95% of that time, it was Google.
Mozilla existed before Firefox.
Well kinda. The Mozilla “Project” goes back to 1998. The Mozilla “Foundation” to 2003. As said, Phoenix was released in 2002 and then renamed to Firefox in 2004.
But in that 4 years they worked on the Netscape code to make Phoenix, they were as well funded by AOL, or not?