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."

Comments

Just making sure Google is listening...

[Muerte2]

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.

I've actually been using bing lately

[AlphaWolf_HK]

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.