Slashdot Mirror
Firefox Signs Five-Year Deal With Yahoo, Drops Google as Default Search Engine
mpicpp writes with news that Yahoo will soon become the default search engine in Firefox. Google's 10-year run as Firefox's default search engine is over. Yahoo wants more search traffic, and a deal with Mozilla will bring it. In a major departure for both Mozilla and Yahoo, Firefox's default search engine is switching from Google to Yahoo in the United States. "I'm thrilled to announce that we've entered into a five-year partnership with Mozilla to make Yahoo the default search experience on Firefox across mobile and desktop," Yahoo Chief Executive Marissa Mayer said in a blog post Wednesday. "This is the most significant partnership for Yahoo in five years." The change will come to Firefox users in the US in December, and later Yahoo will bring that new "clean, modern and immersive search experience" to all Yahoo search users. In another part of the deal, Yahoo will support the Do Not Track technology for Firefox users, meaning that it will respect users' preferences not to be tracked for advertising purposes. With millions of users who perform about 100 billion searches a year, Firefox is a major source of the search traffic that's Google's bread and butter. Some of those searches produce search ads, and Mozilla has been funded primarily from a portion of that revenue that Google shares. In 2012, the most recent year for which figures are available, that search revenue brought in the lion's share of Mozilla's $311 million in revenue.
doesn't Bing supply yahoo's search results now? so it is.. literally Bing -- right?
You're right, but probably Microsoft wasn't interested in paying them while Yahoo! was.
when I felt my gmail was violating my privacy, and adding bloat I never asked for.
LOL:
When you use Yahoo Mail, our automated systems scan and analyze your communications and also the content sent and received from your account to detect, among other things, certain words and phrases (we call them “keywords”) within these communications. In addition to using the keywords to show you contextually relevant content and ads, these keywords may also contribute to our understanding of things that interest you. These interest categories are displayed in Ad Interest Manager.
Umm, if you chose it for "privacy" you probably made the wrong choice.
Pro-tip: you can get the old useful Google back (temporarily, there's no way to save it as a default) by hitting Search Tools -> Change "All Results" to "Verbatim"
Why they don't let you make that the fucking default - in fact, WHY IT ISN'T THE DEFAULT - is anyone's guess.
You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.
The main advantage of Firefox has always been the add-on system, and these aren't getting ported to ARM. They're all x86. They're even having problem convincing add-on makers to recompile them for x64 version of the browser which is why it has remained a non-starter so far. ARM recompiling is basically "not going to happen" land, which means that Firefox on phones is just another browser that has no advantages over most of the other ones.
This is false. Firefox addons are interpreted Javascript, not compiled code. They work the same on all FF browsers. On Linux we've been running 64-bit for many years with no addon problems.
Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law
Maybe I'm misunderstanding you, but you seem to be unaware of the fact that you can configure the search box in Firefox to use whichever search engines you like. Just click on the search engine icon, open the Manage Search Engine modal and move Google to the top of the list or click the "get more search engines" link in case Google isn't included at all.
Hopefully this will keep your eyes in place and your spoons clean.