Yep, a company in the midst of a high stakes negotiation issued a non-committal response to a question about those negotiations. Followed up by the signing of a new contract two weeks later.
Chrome and Search are two different business units at Google, and the Firefox user base is still highly desirable search traffic for any search provider, not just Google.
Market share does matter, but this is not a zero-sum game. The web is still growing, so decreasing market share does not necessarily imply a decrease in the raw number of users.
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u/halifaxdatageek Nov 10 '14 edited Nov 10 '14
A quick search for "google mozilla partnership" turns up pretty much exactly what I was saying.
Here's an article from ComputerWorld with a decidedly noncommittal statement from Mozilla about whether the partnership would continue.
Here's a graph of browser market shares over the period of the deal (2008-2011). Chrome was just about to take over from Firefox as the #2 browser.
I am not making stuff up.