Google has been the Firefox global search default since 2004. Our agreement came up for renewal this year, and we took this as an opportunity to review our competitive strategy and explore our options.
US users will now get Yahoo as the default search engine in Firefox. The question here is this: did Google decide that it was no longer worth it to keep Mozilla afloat financially, or did Mozilla decide to cut the agreement?
Bing and Yahoo are infinitely inferior to google when it comes to giving you relevant results. If they wanted to take some kind of stand against Google and their tracking or something like that they should’ve switched to DuckDuckGo by default. it’s not as good as Google either but at least there would be a purpose to that switch. This is just gonna piss users off that they have to change their search engine on new installations. Are they going to offer the Yahoo toolbar as a bundle next?
Stupid.
Well, whatever spin Mozilla puts on this, the obvious reason they are switching is money (which is why duckduckgo was not an option), Google likely wanted to offer less money as Firefox has decreased market share since last time they negotiated, so Mozilla now decided to take an offer from Yahoo/Bing, and of course we have the whole ‘sponsored tiles’ which is a pretty name for advertisment, which is there to make some more money.
Business as usual, but like ‘cmost’ said you can easily set your search to Google or whatever you wish to use so from a user perspective it’s not a big deal methinks, just like you can easily switch off ‘sponsored tiles’.
That said, here’s hoping this is not a slippery slope kind of thing with increasingly invasive ads.
If they want to pay salaries they have to take in some money from somewhere…
Just a slight correction. Yahoo is Bing. They don’t even run their own search engine any more, they just piggyback on top of Microsoft’s engine. And yes, Bing does suck.
I frequently find Bing to be helpful when I get stuck searching in Google, which is starting to happen more and more frequently. Two years ago I would have agreed about Bing, but today I’m not so certain.
This isn’t about making a stand against Google, this is about what’s best for Mozilla and its goals of preserving user choice, providing better privacy to them as well as keeping all commercial players honest.
That being said DuckDuckGo was added to the default list of search engines in Firefox 33 and this move was publicized to *all* users upgrading from previous versions when the browser was first run after the upgrade; basically every user was explicitly given the choice to switch to use it instead of whatever was the default before.
That being said calling people stupid without knowing the context in which the decision was made is a bit arrogant to say the least.
disclaimer: I work for Mozilla
Edited 2014-11-20 10:05 UTC
Please expand on ‘preserving user choice’, Yahoo, Yandex and Baidu were options available before, so the user had the choice all along.
I couldn’t care less just so long as I can switch the default search engine back to Google in a few clicks. I think some users forget that they have options and just blindly follow default settings so that they can later raise a storm in a teacup.
Not necessary forget, or they don’t know how, but they just don’t want to be bothered to do so.
Often when I am on a new windows system it takes me months before I switch off Bing to Google from IE. Just because at the time it isn’t a big concern.
Partially just because I don’t use EI that much.
I don’t know what’s going on behind the scenes, but I do know that Google provides the financing that keeps Firefox going. Google doesn’t do this out of the goodness of their heart, but rather because Firefox uses Google as the default search engine.
So if Firefox is switching to Yahoo (at least for US users), I assume that they are being paid by Yahoo to do this. I kind of doubt Yahoo just made Firefox a better offer, though they could since Yahoo depends on Microsoft’s Bing, and it would be in Microsoft’s interests to undermine Google.
Problem is that Yahoo/Microsoft would drop the financing of Firefox at any time. It would be in Microsoft’s interests to kill Firefox, since it is a major competitor to Internet Explorer.
For Linux users, it would not be good news to see Firefox die. That would leave us with only two modern browsers, Chrome and (closed-source) Opera.
Again, I don’t know what’s going on the background. But I do know that Google wasn’t very happy about FirefoxOS, which is a competitor to ChromeOS. Although there is practically no market for FirefoxOS, it was an irritant in the relationship between Google and Firefox developers. I really don’t know why the Firefox folks insisted on making their own operating system since practically nobody wants it.
Edited 2014-11-20 03:25 UTC
Typical behaviour of a monopolist.
Well, so could Google so it’s really status quo.
I can’t believe, a popular open-source project can die. If Mozilla couldn’t afford on development of the browser, the volunteers would continue developing it for sure.
Name one big project (we are talking about the browser, one of the most complicated type of software in use today), where this actually worked out.
OpenOffice/LibreOffice, 0 A.D. (game) and Blender are good examples, to mention some. Complexity of browser technology shouldn’t be an issue, as long as the code base is modular.
OpenOffice/LibreOffice are afloat because they have full-time developers employed by various companies. On the other two can’t comment since I am not familiar with them.
It’s not like other companies aren’t donating to Mozilla.
If they were in real strife, you can bet there would be other companies employing devs for them; I mean, people are paid by places like bluesystems to work on KDE full time, and that has nowhere near the reach of Firefox.
Firefox isn’t going to die, it’s just going to be used less. Which hasn’t hurt innovation in KDE/Gnome, or Calligra. Same for GCC being sponsored by the FSF.
Firefox is the most viable FOSS browser, due to Google’s tendrils in Chromium.
This was Mozilla’s choice. Everybody was bidding for being the default search engine including Google. And no, this won’t be detrimental to Firefox, quite the contrary. While Google has been the default search engine in Firefox for 10 years it was pushing Chrome hard via their services as well as side-installations that came with all sort of programs. Now Yahoo will have all the incentive to push Firefox instead, something that Google would never have done. Besides this also gives better alignment with Mozilla’s goal of siding with users. For example, Yahoo will honor do-not-track requests from Firefox, another thing that Google would never had done.
disclaimer: I work for Mozilla
i would say we will see in a couple of years if this will or won’t be detrimental to Firefox
if i would be a gambler, i wouldn’t put my money on Mozilla.
I’m very afraid that Firefox would become very irrelevant. I used Firefox until I switched to Chrome last year. I felt that the image quality was deteriorating very quickly and I think they need to replace the Gecko layout engine to Servo (with Rust) ASAP. Also, Firefox’s bookmark recovery function was seriously damaged that I lost all of my important bookmarks forever in my workplace.
A message to Firefox devolopers: fix everything and Firefox can be relevant again.
They will. They’ll make it look even more like Chrome and push it to Firefox 40. Job done.
For me Firefox became irrelevant on the switch to version 4.
I have been using Pale Moon for a while, it uses the Firefox source code but makes the UI usable again and a bit like Firefox 3.
Can’t wait for it, been looking for some years now to switch from Chrome spyware back to Firefox. They are definitely getting there, and it is within sight now.
Yes, I believe so too.
Their latest and last large project (IMHO):
http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2013/12/mozilla-makin…
Here you can see the addons-support for ‘e10’:
http://arewee10syet.com/
Firefox 4 is the last version made in the normal 1,5 year development cycle. PaleMoon is made to look like Firefox 4. What PaleMoon does can also be done with one extension within one minute.
Trolling/Dumb/Lazy are my guesses.
Here we go with the name calling. That makes you the idiot and troll, nobody else.
I get it, you like it and won’t accept that other people don’t, tough shit, I hate it. That’s the main reason I also avoid Chrome, useless UI, TO ME not you.
If you read again I said it became irrelevant TO ME after switching to version 4, I don’t care what the release schedule was then or now. And as far as I remember it, Pale Moon resembles 3 more than 4 as version 4 is where the UI changes began to creep in.
Now, you go away and enjoy your Firefox, I’ll go in the other direction thank you very much!
It is only name calling when it is unfounded. You made claims that were simply not true. You could have solved those problems you had within 5 minutes of google. With that information I could simply not conclude that you are a smart person.
With your reply you could have set me straight on were I was wrong but you only confirmed it and more.
I know how to solve those problems without having to resort to searches, I just chose not to. Why bother when there is a alternative out there? I used Firefox from way back when it was still in beta until about 3 years ago, it just became something that didn’t suit me, can’t quite put my finger on it but apart from the UI changes it started to “feel” different to me somehow.
However Pale Moon has recently made some changes that has driven some folk away and maybe I will follow, I haven’t looked at Firefox in that time so I may give it another go.
That sounds a lot different from your previous comments. I respect your opinion and the way you voice it here. Thanks.
No problem. I do tend to put things the wrong way at times, my fault.
It does seem a bit of a balancing act to get the software how you like it now. I think I can accept the UI changes on Firefox more than the extension breakages on Pale Moon. At least Firefox can be altered back with a few extensions.
If you can’t use the default Firefox UI, perhaps you haven’t tried. It’s basically chrome anyway, without the constant spying.
Firefox’s UI is unusable? Odd, I use it and have no problem…
Edited 2014-11-20 17:17 UTC
Are you aware that everything you do using Chrome is being tracked. As a part of the botnet your browser provides data for the US government that currently has over 4000 active surveillance programs, as does IE, Safari and Opera.
Firefox is the only browser that is not a part of the surveillance system, and therefore the only browser to use. It does not matter if it is better or worse, faster or slower, buggy or not, it is the only browser that does not compromise your basic civil liberties.
Why? Do you see a rendering difference between blink and gecko? What if Firefox was using servo right now; do you think you could ‘feel’ it?
Firefox’s bookmark recovery function is pretty good. You have bookmarks.html backupped every day and the main file has a sqlite3 database. On top of that you can use sync and you can easily backup your bookmarks by mailing them.
https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/recover-lost-or-missing-bookmar…
Are you just trolling?
I found that after Firefox update to version 33 it started to establish connections to Google servers like Chrome browser do then you start to use it. For Firefox I setup blank page for start page, I chose Yandex for my default search engine, I turned off all updates and reports but it continues connect to Google servers. It holds connection for 2-3 minutes and then disconnects.
I use Linux Mint 17 and Windows 7, It happening under both systems. Can anyboby explane it?
Netstat -t -u -c command shows that:
Active Internet connections (w/o servers)
Proto Recv-Q Send-Q Local Address Foreign Address State
tcp 0 0 hc.lan:39591 fra07s30-in-f1.1e:https ESTABLISHED
tcp 0 0 hc.lan:46901 fra07s29-in-f9.1e:https ESTABLISHED
tcp 0 0 hc.lan:52195 fra07s30-in-f4.1e1:http ESTABLISHED
tcp6 1 0 ip6-localhost:52150 ip6-localhost:ipp CLOSE_WAIT
tcp6 1 0 ip6-localhost:52103 ip6-localhost:ipp CLOSE_WAIT
and
netstat -atnp | grep ESTA
(Not all processes could be identified, non-owned process info
will not be shown, you would have to be root to see it all.)
tcp 0 0 192.168.1.64:52028 173.194.125.8:443 ESTABLISHED 4859/firefox
tcp 0 0 192.168.1.64:36736 173.194.112.105:80 ESTABLISHED 4859/firefox
tcp 0 0 192.168.1.64:53145 173.194.112.98:443 ESTABLISHED 4859/firefox
Sorry for my weak english.
At least one of those connections is http (i.e. not https) so you can fire up a wireshark, sniff the connection and find out what it is about.
There was a discussion about this recently on the Arch Linux forums:
https://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?id=189960
I think Firefox connects to Google every day to update the list of malware sites.
The answer is right in the linked article of the post…
“Google will also continue to power the Safe Browsing and Geolocation features of Firefox.”
You use the Yandex browser but worried about Google? I guess if you are a US citizen and not a Russia one.
Edited 2014-11-20 17:25 UTC
Thank you guys for your replies. Maleware list or mayby something else also. Windows version of FF 33 connects to Amazon servers too. In my view it is FF fall to big guys business. This browser is not clean anymore. I decided to rollback to ver. 32 for a while. I don’t want to be an instrument in hands of Google, Amazon etc.
Google has been pushing really interesting technologies that Firefox disses only because they come from Google.
The WebP image format was a great solution to having images with transparency that can be compressed, really helpful for games. Firefox decided that transparency is not important and that JPG is fine.
PNaCL is an amazing piece of code that allows running a platform independent VM where any language (even C and C++) can run, but FireFox decided Javascript is the future and that we should only use JS and that no matter what you want to program on, it has to run JS, then they push the extremely hacked asm.js.
Thanks for that, Firefox, I hope you die now.
This has always been the case with Mozilla. They were the guys who invented APNG instead of implementing MNG, thus ensuring PNG never replaced GIF on the web. Ho hum.
Google has also been pushing the water on its mill quite aggressively, killing GTalk, making no desktop client for Hangouts, refusing to respect OS’ native notification system, etc. It has been pissing me off for some time now. I’m not their freaking product, it is the other way around.
Really? So you’re a Google employee and the products are a result of your efforts? If so you may wish to be careful what you post publically if you wish to keep your job. Companies take a dim view of this sort of thing.
Try again
I simply do not have a clue of what is really happening inside the Firefox-Google relationship.
But one thing I know is that in the Firefox OS Marketplace there are already two apps by Microsoft and none from Google;(Bing search and Bing Maps).
I have an intuition telling me that MS is observing FF and its strategy more closely than Google does… “it’s the internet, stupid, not the apps.”
The FF OS Markeplace is pile of crap. I have a FF phone and haven’t installed any apps after trying out several and finding them to be dire, jeez – it even makes the windows store look good.
The first thing I shall do is switch to google or duckduckgo… (really not much better)
Why degrade usefulness for USA only?
Huh? Stop trolling…
I’m seriously interested why US only. It’s not trolling.
You asked “Why degrade usefulness for USA only?” but nothing is being degraded so you sound tollish.
Now for your second question why the US only… You should have read the link posted in the article. Firefox is now partnering (being paid) with search providers based on location. In the US, that is Yahoo.
Though this is a minor inconvenience for those of us who prefer Google, just a few simple clicks and Google is back as your default search engine, one has to ask: Is Yahoo! even relevant any more?