Google pays the Mozilla Foundation commision to have it’s search box the default in the Firefox web browser, which this year amounted to a cool $57 million. Considering Firefox is used by 120 million people, that’s not a bad deal for Google. I know I don’t type google.com in very often - pretty much exclusively using the built-in the search box, which is set to, Google. Then if Firefox were to ship with the default to, say, Yahoo, I’d switch it to Google as soon as I downloaded it, as would many (and of course as people do if their engine isn’t Google).

This comes from the financial statements Mozilla released today, and in case you’re wondering, their total revenues were $67 million, with expenses in 2006 of just under $20 million. Why doesn’t Google just buy Mozilla?

See here for more..