Does Firefox make money even if I don't use Google as my default search engine?
How does it work anyway? I mean, how does Firefox make money? Are they paid per google search or something like that?
And, do they make money if I use forks of firefox and use Google on them?
And, what are the total number of active users for Mozilla and do the forks account into this count?
They get paid by Google just to keep existing as a competitor
The same reason MS saved Apple in the late 90s.
That's a common misconception. Microsoft paid Apple so they would drop a lawsuit that accused Microsoft of stealing concepts and ideas from Apple's MacOS and putting them into Windows. Which was ironic because Apple had stolen them from the Xerox Palo Alto research lab previously. Gates anecdotally told Jobs "Steve, it's like I broke into a house to rob it and found out you'd already cleaned out the place".
But it was Apple not Xerox or Microsoft that had put those concepts on the market first and they would've had a strong case. So Gates paid for it to go away and also arranged some cross licensing so it wouldn't happen again.
Afaik the deal between Mozilla/Firefox and Alphabet/Google is that Mozilla receives funding for setting Google as the default search engine. When the user decides to change that after install it has no influence on that contract.
My guess is that the deal is based on Firefox' market share, so as long as the fork identifies as Firefox by user agent, this shouldn't influence it at all.
There can be only estimations, either based on market share analysis or build-in telemetry.
Firefox is a piece of open source software. One can download it for free. It's packaged by many different organizations for use in different settings.
In general, if a developer is modifying Firefox for their own needs, logging data would probably still report it as Firefox even if the browser has been renamed. Of course that could be changed if a developer wanted to do so, and as a user you can even install plugins that allow you to spoof browser profiles.
There is an NPO called The Mozilla Foundation that develops Firefox, although many contributions come from people who are not part of the foundation. If you're asking how much money the NPO uses, I think you can go take a look at its books. It is an NPO, so making money is not the objective.
There is an NPO called The Mozilla Foundation that develops Firefox
Just to be precise, Firefox development is lead by Mozilla Corporation, which in theory is a for-profit company; however it is fully owned by the Mozilla Foundation, and all profit is reinvested to the Mozilla project.
It's like Google's deal with Apple. Apple receives around $10 Billion a year to make Google the default search. I don't believe Siri search can be changed, but if the user changes safari over to DDG, Apple already got paid. The amount Google pays out doesn't depend on users KEEPING Google search. Just that it was the default.
Firefox gets a lot of money from google for that, don't concern yourself with firefox earnings.
You don't have to use Google at all. They are pretty ubiquitous, so you have to make a little effort - search with another tool (I find duckduckgo to be quite satisfactory). Although Youtube has the lion's share of the video, there are other places to go. It is the same with all Google products.