Mozilla secures crucial Google deal

Mozilla has extended its lucrative search deal with Google, ensuring it won't miss out on big money for at least the next three years.

It means Google will remain the default search provider in Firefox. The initial partnership ended this year and without this week's extension Mozilla could have been in financial danger.

Last year, 84 per cent of Mozilla's revenue came from Google.

"Under this multi-year agreement, Google Search will continue to be the default search provider for hundreds of millions of Firefox users around the world," said Gary Kovacs, CEO of Mozilla.

"Mozilla has been a valuable partner to Google over the years and we look forward to continuing this great partnership in the years to come," added Alan Eustace, senior vice president of search at Google.

The deal comes in the same week Firefox 9 was launched, with Mozilla claiming it would deliver a 30 per cent speed boost thanks to improvements in JavaScript.

The speed boost comes thanks to the Type Inference feature in the latest iteration of Firefox.

"TI is a feature in the SpiderMonkey Javascript engine which generates type information about Javascript programs through a combination of analyzing the program's code and monitoring the types of values as the program executes," said Brian Hackett, Firefox engineer, in a blog post.

"This type information is used during JIT compilation to generate more efficient code; Firefox 9 includes modifications to the JaegerMonkey JIT compiler to use inferred type information."