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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.
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.
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 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'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.
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
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
As a professional developer in the web/services space, I'm using firebug most of the time. I find it most capable of dealing with highly dynamic DOM/css. There are most definitely bugs and issues with it but they aren't deal breakers. It does crash. Some stuff doesn't work. You sometimes get back garbage values. But all that considered, I still find it to be a better debugging tool than either the IE dev tools or chrome's tools. I'll also say that I do use all three toolsets. This isn't an "i only use firebug" fanboy reaction. I live and breath all three, as well as a pile of proprietary internal tools. But as far as debugging highly complex dynamic pages, firebug is my first choice by far.