OStatic

Yeah, the Mozilla folks just keep going. Like the Energizer Bunny of the Web, they're always up to something new. This time it's Drumbeat, a sort of umbrella project for various projects to create tools that enable Internet users to understand, participate and take control of their own lives. The project has been bootstrapping itself and Mark Surman, executive director of the Mozilla Project, posted an update on the progress of the project yesterday.

The Mozilla Foundation has posted its financial statements and tax info for 2008, and a FAQ on the topic for those of us with short attention spans. While plowing through financial statements may not be the most exciting topic for Free and Open Source advocates, it's worth taking a look at what Mozilla has achieved as an independent project, where it's going, and how other projects might be able to emulate Mozilla's success to fund more and more FOSS development.

The good news is that, as of the end of their 2008 fiscal year, Mozilla is weathering the lousy economy pretty well. According to Mitchell Baker's post, reported revenues were up 5% from 2007, and the bulk of that revenue comes from the Firefox search functionality linking back to Google, Yahoo, Amazon, and eBay. But Moz got dinged by the financial crisis in 2008, losing nearly $8 million of its long-term portfolio.

This week, the European Commission announced its preliminary satisfaction with a settlement offer proposed by Microsoft that would end an antitrust battle that has been simmering for over 10 years. Microsoft General Counsel Brad Smith posted a response that said: We welcome today?s announcement by the European Commission to move forward with formal market testing of Microsoft?s proposal relating to web browser choice in Europe. We also welcome the opportunity to take the next step in the process regarding our proposal to promote interoperability with a broad range of our products.?

As Smith alludes to, a big part of the proposed settlement has to do with Microsoft including a browser ballot window in Internet Explorer that lists a broad array of browsers and allows users to choose which one to use. Opponents of that proposal, including Mozilla and Opera, have criticized the fact that the ballot screen is found within Internet Explorer, which is still bundled with Windows, and the fact that any alternative browser must be downloaded, which many users will be too lazy to do. So why are Mozilla and Opera being so reticent in the wake of the European announcement?

We've written extensively about the declining market share of Microsoft's Internet Explorer browser, which is being challenged from every angle by open source browsers such as Google Chrome and Mozilla Firefox. Firefox is already the number one browser in Europe, is vastly more extensible than Internet Explorer, and is out in an excellent new Release Candidate version 3.5. ?The European Commission is also pressuring Microsoft on its distribution practices for its browser.

How desperate is Microsoft to woo users to its Internet Explorer version 8 browser? Mozilla Chair Mitchell Baker points out in a blog post that Microsoft is now offering $10,000 in prize money buried somewhere on the Internet which you can only find if you use Internet Explorer. Come on Microsoft, Internet Explorer needs a lot more than this marketing campaign to shore up its prospects.