New Port Beach Business Daily

How do IE and Firefox make money? Where is the revenue source coming in from?

How do Microsoft and the owners of Firefox make money? Google is planning to create a browser also to compete with them called "chrome". I was wondering where does the source of revenue come in? There are no ads, etc. These programs are free.

Public Comments

1. Microsoft makes money (obviously) by selling their software and having a big monopoly on the desktop. Firefox does it by "advertising" Google by having the search bar. Firefox is open source, so much of the work done to make it was done for free by people who wanted to contribute, making it much easier to support financially.
2. Firefox gets a bunch of money from google for the search bar. MS probably generates money by having AOL as the home page. Sure you can change it, but a lot of people leave the home page as it is (which is AOL), and so AOL probably pays MS.
3. Microsoft make money by selling their other products (MS Office, etc...) Mozilla receive contribution by donations from various sources (like shareware). For exemple: Google is giving tons of money to Mozilla (developer of Firefox, Thunderbird (e-mail), and other products). Everyone can contribute in development at Mozilla, since it is an open-source software.