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.
Bing!
Let's see if Yahoo can use the additional funds to improve their search quality, then maybe we can have at least two choices for each search (not counting metasearch engines).
I switch the default on every install anyway, so ... *shrug*
Once upon a time, when we talked about things like "Web Portals," and people knew who Jerry Yang was, Yahoo! was cool, and offered a lot of useful curating and information. Also some good times playing hearts and backgammon on Yahoo! games.
Then there was babel fish.
Then there was Google beta.
Then Deja News was no more.
And now Yahoo! is cool again?
So if two listing, burning ships strap themselves together, do they float better? Or do they just sink faster? It seems to me that if your browser market-share is dropping and you're losing relevance, the best move is probably not to attach yourself to a search engine whose market share and relevance were lost years ago.
I am a geek attorney, but not your geek attorney unless you've already retained me. This is not legal advice.
doesn't Bing supply yahoo's search results now? so it is.. literally Bing -- right?
It will be hard for anyone here to assess this move. Having not used Yahoo! search for a long time, I have no idea about the quality of their search results. It is even less clear whether the typical Mozilla user will care about any possible differences, or the extent to which Mozilla users might change browsers because of this
If I had to guess, I'd say that very few people choose their brower based on the default search engine, and therefore very few will change browers because of this. If the userbase is really fixed then Mozilla should try to maximize their revenue by letting Yahoo! and Google bid for the rights.
Yahoo *is* Bing, actually, as far as the search engine backend goes.
And Bing really is a search engine backend
[rimshot]
I just don't even know how to feel right now...
I agree that the Google being both a competitor and (until now) a sponsor is the major consideration here, not the quality of search results. The question is whether Google really are more motivated to support Mozilla when they are getting revenue from browser searches than when they aren't. Quite possibly the Mozilla Foundation concluded that Google would compete with them in any case.
Yahoo won me back as my primary email when I felt my gmail was violating my privacy, and adding bloat I never asked for. Something felt wrong about it.
I looked and Yahoo was the only one that still seemed to be human.
You're right, but probably Microsoft wasn't interested in paying them while Yahoo! was.
Who uses the default search engine anyway?
Now that Google has every reason to crush Firefox, what is Mozilla's market share going to be in 2019? I sense a poll coming up.
Google doesn't have to crush Firefox. The shitty arrogant Firefox developers are doing that on their own.
At least DuckDuckGo doesn't ASK you to install a toolbar every fucking time you need to update Java...
Yes, but there are rumblings of them trying to launch their own engine again. http://searchenginewatch.com/a...
Yahoo's never been effective at writing their own search engine; they were powered by Google up until 2004, and before that Inktomi. In 2004 they tried their own engine for the first time, but it sucked. In 2009 they cut a deal with Bing.
rage, rage against the dying of the light
Interesting that more companies are moving away form Google. A couple months ago, RealNetworks (ya, reliable I know) changed it's default 2nd party offer from Google / Chrome to Ask. (Fun for the day: use Ask search and search for Ask toolbar ... examine the results).
... Google works fine. However ... frequently Google will substitute terms (that don't belong), add obvious sales links (that don't apply), or have a referral to a second level search (which has always useless: best example is returning searches for an items from eBay -- if I wanted eBay I would search eBay). Google's image search(method) is much better than Bing's ... but is there a viable option "B" general text / info search?
For me, it is getting harder to use Google search, especially if I want to search for more than two words. For simple searches
Funny; FF has been my default browser for almost a decade now. Why? The plugins and the ability to control it all myself. Chrome/Chromium are too tied to the mothership for me -- and I say that as someone who uses 8.8.8.8 for DNS.
That said, if NoScript starts working on Chrome, I'd likely switch eventually -- and no, NoScripts isn't a real replacement.
For that matter, people still use Yahoo for searches?
>Went Chrome years ago and have not looked back.
Then your opinion is basically worthless.
I've actually tried Firefox out regularly and noticed that for all the bluster of your average Slashdot sycophant, Firefox is actually getting good enough that I no longer care which browser I'm using. In fact I can't remember much of value coming down the pipe from Chrome, even counting the web video stuff. Firefox may be bleeding some users due to a lengthy period of retrofitting and revamping, but the real reason they'll die is because they can't get a foothold in the mobile market - Google doesn't allow Android devices to be bundled with another browser by default, and Apple and Microsoft don't even let another browser engines run on theirs.
But don't let reality weigh you down. It's trendy to bash on Firefox, after all.
I don't think Yahoo actually wants to be a search engine. I think they just want people to look at their ads.
Yup, which is why they've licensed someone else's tech to power the searches for most of the company's history.
By partnering with a browser: they can run searches through Google's servers but strip the Google Adword adds and replace them with Yahoo Ads.
Wait, what? You think Yahoo is going to use Google to power their search engine, without paying them? And you think Google's lawyers (let alone their technical team) would really let that fly?
why would you want your employees OFF of Firefox. What else would you have them use?
Chrome? I don't know about you but I HATE chrome on my networks. People bring in all kinds of stuff. They have all the major browser hijacks at home, it autoinstalls the toolbars/searchengines and what not at work too. fun.
IE? Do we need to discuss IE? lolz
I'm to the point, especially with the amount of malware coming through via ads, to push everyone ONTO Firefox and adblock.
If your CEO is so easily pissed off, he can't change his search engine, like in IE, I imagine your life is hell.
In other news, Libre browesers like icecat, Iceweasel, and Abrowser offer search engines.like DuckDuckGo and Blekko. Wolfram Alpha comes in handy on ocassion. You don't have to live in a Google/Yahoo!/Bing! world. May myriads of search engines bloom in a more diverse interweb.
"SO we bide our time, waiting for a purer kick to bloom and the future is still bleak, uncertain and beautiful" -GSYBE
it's like a really awful Rob Zombie song
Mod me down, my New Earth Global Warmingist friends!
There, fixed that title for you /. editors
Oh mobile /., how useful a preview comment would be
Google was paying Mozilla before for traffic driven their way, that will presumably end now.
So if I'm using Firefox and switch back to Google (because I don't want to use reskinned Bing), Mozilla won't be getting anything anymore.
-- "So they told me that using the download page to download something was not something they anticipated." - Bill Gates
I use Firefox in preference to Chrome because of the superior and more permissive add on ecosystem, fine grained JavaScript controls, better tools for privacy protection and better (yes, really) memory management for my browsing habits.
Just the fact that I can have hassle free ad blocking on Android makes it worthy of consideration.
-- I wanna decide who lives and who dies - Crow T. Robot, MST3K
People who use Chrome are like AOL users. Like wearing a t-shirt which says "I'm an idiot". Thank you for that. You are an idiot for using software by an ad broker which sells you as a product.
It's already been done. Firefox today is but a pale shadow of itself before the whole Google's invasion and turning of Firefox UI into Chrome clone.
It's been bleeding userbase for years now, and this move is likely going to just accelerate the process because "strange, my browser no longer searches on google, hmm.. oh look, google has a browser they offer that looks just like mine for free that will search on google!" [click]
> Definitely not "dead easy", but quite doable if you are only somewhat technical and sufficiently intrepid.
How much easier can it get than selecting it from the drop-down menu and leaving it?
So Mozilla goes for funding sources other than Google and your CEO gets pissed off? Sounds to me like your CEO is irrational and you had a bone to pick with Mozilla (over some perceived, but nonexistent, slight against you.)
just prefix the search with !g for google, https://duck.co/help/features/...
Mobile market is but a distraction for Mozilla with its nonexistent marketshare. 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.
Desktop on the other hand isn't going anywhere any time soon, and that's where Mozilla's marketshare is. Or more accurately was. It's been bleeding it so long, it's but a pale shadow of its former self now.
Can somebody please mod down Moderator's comments, just for the lols?
But I think Google cut Mozilla out of some revenue sharing thing. It doesn't look like there was much choice.
This is not the case... I was the internal meeting at Mozilla earlier today, and it was made very clear that all options (including Google) had stronger economic terms (than the current deal).
So it wasn't because Google cut Mozilla out.
See the official announcement too:
https://blog.mozilla.org/blog/...
Personally, I see how this can only foster more competition, less monoculture and thus a better web.
Then Netscape said to Firefox: "You and me, we've got nowhere to go but up!"
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
I run both side by side because I have one site I need which for some completely unknown reason doesn't work in Chrome. Outside of that though I use chrome for everything. There are a couple of things I wish I could do in Chrome that firefox does - vertical tabs for one. But then I discovered Tabs Outliner which fulfils my requirements better.
I like having synced bookmarks, history etc across all my devices and I don't care about google harvesting my data. (I don't think I have ever clicked an internet ad on purpose)
Your CEO cares enough about the search engine setting in browsers to be pissed off but isn't smart enough to know how to change it? Sounds like a fascinating company...
I live ze unknown. I love ze unknown. I am ze unknown.
I've been using Linux Mint lately, and fucking up my system royally. So I've had to fall back on the LiveUSB installation to repair the system. Mint doesn't get a financial kickback from Google, so they ship Yahoo! as the default search engine instead. This has led me, by accident, to use Yahoo! a few times when looking for information.
I'm not saying that I would rather gouge my eyes out with a spoon than use Yahoo! search; that wouldn't make my system boot. Was it worth it to continually type in 'google' and hit Ctrl+Enter before entering a search query? Yes, every single time, and I deeply regretted each lapse in memory. The only reason Firefox might care about Google is if they care about the quality of their search results.
For me, as a web developer, even though the built-in tools in Chrome and Firefox have come a long way since 2006, I still prefer debugging in Firebug, and installing Adblock Plus, NoScript, and Tree Style Tabs. Firefox is my web browser of choice. However, Google is still my search engine of choice, and having one without the other is a serious issue for me. I hope that I will remember every time to go to google.com when I need to search for information, but every time I forget, I am sure that I will curse this deal.
Those who advocate genocide deserve every protection afforded by law, and none afforded by common human decency.
Note the specific language being used.
"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."
The Do Not Track tag clearly specifies that the user does not want to be tracked. However, Yahoo is twisting its meaning such that the user is not tracked for advertising purposes. Two very different things. Unfortunately, despite considerable effort, there is no standardized meaning for Do Not Track. All too often, corporations invent new meanings for those simple three words in order to continue making a profit by tracking users who have explicitly indicated not wanting to be tracked. So much for notice and choice.
I suspect he was talking about firefox plugins (flash, java, the google hangouts one, etc.), not add-ons. The plugins are indeed dynamically loaded libraries that need to be compiled for the same architecture as the browser itself in order to be loaded.
Firefox sucks.
"If any question why we died, Tell them because our fathers lied."
If you run a restaurant, and you serve soft drinks, you can serve Coca-Cola Products or Pepsi products.
Many years ago (before 1997) some restaurant chains objected to Pepsi products because Pepsi owned restaurant chains including Pizza Hut and KFC, and cross promoted its drinks with the restaurants.
Back then Pepsi would pay restaurants to use their products in stead of Coke. So they were able to overcome some of the competitive objections to using their products. Coke never paid.
In the late 90s, Pepsi solved the problem by a corporate separation of the restaurants and the drinks. The restaurant company is now called Yum! Brands. I assume they stopped paying restaurants to take their products.
To me Google vs Yahoo resembles the Coke vs. Pepsi situation. And, it is just as important.
In the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is king.
I did too. Until Chrome started sucking more. Then I went back to Firefox. I'm not comfortable with some of their recent moves, but no other browser is as flexible.
True, but I have never seen anyone argue that "the main advantage of Firefox has always been the plugin system".
Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law
Default...
Easy enough to change it back to Google.
Let me predict the future a little here. Yahoo will realize that everyone with a brain, aka a portion of Firefox users, will immediately switch to Google as the default. That will be followed by either Mozilla locking it in and dropping to 0.0001% market share or Yahoo pulling out because it's not profitable and Google not taking them back, resulting in a drop to 0.0001% market share due to the company self destructing.
oh wait, doh!
What's sad is that Chrome for Android only has 9.51% instead of nearly 100%. The default "Android Web browser" is useless.
Get free satoshi (Bitcoin) and Dogecoins
Firefox, with its marketing deals and in-browser ads is no longer "it". It would be great to have an independent project driver by developer enthusiasm rather than anyone's business needs. Linux kernel and many other projects manage that somehow. Only then the software can do uncompromisingly right things for users and web developers. Why silently pick one search engine when query can be submitted to several in parallel and user given a quick tool to compare results?
On developer side, we need a truly great and modern language rather then ever more arcane Javascript libraries and optimization engines.
I'm big and fond of Firefox since it's the only major browser with APNG support.
Why would Google want to crush Firefox? What motive does it have?
Firefox is an open-source browser that poses zero threat to any of Google's businesses. It can't be used in the same way IE was to limit competition. There will always be some people who aren't using Chrome. If they can't have everyone using Chrome, the next best thing is putting Google on as many browsers as possible. Chrome is all about making it easier for people to use their services, the browser itself is not that important.
A good chunk of Firefox user are people who've had it installed for them before Chrome existed and have just stuck with it. These are the kinds of people who would use the Firefox default search without noticing a change. Firefox still has ~20% market share, it might make a difference.
DuckDuckGo reportedly uses the Russian search engine Yandex as its back end. Is there an advantage to using DuckDuckGo over just using Yandex directly?
If I mistype, so be it tell me so. It is usually one character so is easier to fix then look through the garbage from the search engine.
I go out of my way to complicate the simple things, so that I can simplify the complicated things.
So if two listing, burning ships strap themselves together, do they float better?
yes they become a ghetto catamaran.
But make sure they're aligned properly when you tie them together. Otherwise, you end up with not a catamaran but a katamari, which doesn't float quite as well.
That's a poor decision on Mozilla's part.
I still use Firefox primarily, and most IT people I know do the same. Chrome is glorified IE that runs in Linux too.. big whoop I don't wanna use it because I have very little trust for Google or MS. Opera is my 2nd favorite, but can be bothersome for certain tasks. Firefox used to be a friendly thing for Google, but Google now pushes their own browser..their prerogative, I don't mean that as an insult.
So Firefox defaults to Yahoo.. no biggie. I can turn that off as easily as I can change IE to something other than Bing. If I could not do that, it would be a problem.. as it is.. it's just a minor inconvenience I'm willing to accept. If they fund Firefox better, so be it. Yahoo's their own company too and can make their own choice (though I won't use them either, except for burner test accounts)
-The wise argue that there are few absolutes, the fool argues that there are no probabilities.
The other thing I hate about the mobile version of Firefox is that it puts the page title in the location bar, so I can't really tell what site I'm on. Title's can lie, I want to see the actual address. On mobile, I use Dolphin Browser. It works pretty good for the most part, some minor issues, but I can still watch flash videos with it on the newer android devices. It also isn't Chrome, I agree about the privacy issue... they all might have issues, but phoning everything home to Google is too creepy for me.
-- I ignore anonymous replies to my comments and postings.
is that this is true:
"This is the most significant partnership for Yahoo in five years."
tone
Been using Dolphin for 3 years on my Tab 2 and Tab 4, Chrome never worked right for me though it's my PC browser on desktop, latop and Netbook. Yes, I still use my Asus EEE on occasion. The new Dolphin home screen stays put as well, why does Google have to keep shuffling everything, are they big LMFAO fans?
The plugins are indeed dynamically loaded libraries that need to be compiled for the same architecture as the browser itself in order to be loaded.
Why can't a 64-bit Firefox communicate with a 32-bit plugin-container.exe?
Firefox's default search engine is switching from Google to Yahoo in the United States.
So clearly, Firefox have agreed on $$$$$$ sum from Yahoo.
My question is, considering the project is "open source", who receives the money?
Wait, no love for webcrawler? Ask Jeeves?
Went to install Dolphin but declined upon seeing the permissions required. I don't want a browser to have access to so much on my device... is there another option I'm not seeing?
Firefox on Android has got really good in the past year or so, I use it exclusively now. The only issue, and this rarely comes up, is that really heavy javascript sites can get sluggish.
Same here. I switched to Pale Moon after the CEO debacle, which is still Firefox underneath. I'd love to cut the cord completely, but I've yet to find another browser that doesn't come with its own set of baggage. Chrome will probably be the one. Sure, it wants to invade my life and sell my soul to advertisers, but at least they're not pushing a social/political ideology. I go to work to make money too.
There's an opportunity for a new browser to attract those that have become detached from the ones currently available. MSIE is a security nightmare, Google is the for-profit arm of the NSA, Firefox adverse to free speech and the home of feature creep extreme edition. Tons of others with usability and compatibility issues. What's a person to do?
I thought mozilla was not for profit, so who's getting the money ? Then whats next, suggested (sponsored ) web pages, killing extensions like ad blockers and more annoyances. It just takes a second to say make chrome the default browser.
Well, given that I haven't used Yahoo for anything except yellow pages (and even that rarely) for ten years, I ask the question:
Will Yahoo even survive the five year run of this contract?
It's really quite a simple choice: Life, Death, or Los Angeles.
"why would you want your employees OFF of Firefox. What else would you have them use?"
Something that has some actual STEADY (and not continually dropping like a rock) usage.
Also, Firefox, one tab open, freshly-loaded after reboot. 415MB RAM usage. The bloat they add into the starting of the page, making you wait essentially 2-3 seconds before you can type anything in the URL bar; fuck that too.
they have simply gone AWAY from anything they were. And it absolutely fucking sucks.
We'll use Chromium instead, and ignore Google's own offering.
It's not like 10 employees is going to make a difference, but the same options FireFox has are available for Chromium, at far less bloat, and lower resource usage.
Still waiting on Serviscope_minor to wake up to fucking reality and realize that Jessica Price isn't going to fuck him.
While Google may suck due to localization of search results, making me do more than I need to is an annoyance, and this finally got to my boss when he read that.
It's only 10 employees. Nobody's really gonna care, but I'm glad. Firefox is slowly but surely moving away from proper standards support. Chrome, Safari, IE11/10/8 even IE6 displays my website properly. Firefox? Bidding buttons are half-in half-out of their auction box with this latest update. They're fucking off.
Still waiting on Serviscope_minor to wake up to fucking reality and realize that Jessica Price isn't going to fuck him.
You must really suck at reading comprehension.
'Finally gave me leverage'. That implies there's also a WHOLE OTHER SLEW OF BULLSHIT BEFOREHAND.
But AC's aren't very bright, so I'll forgive your ignorance. Not.
Still waiting on Serviscope_minor to wake up to fucking reality and realize that Jessica Price isn't going to fuck him.
I love your lack of critical thinking. Very unfitting of someone with your UID.
Re-read my statement, think a little harder. There's a key word in there that you're either ignoring or attributing a wrong meaning to. I know which word it is, let's see if you can figure it out.
Still waiting on Serviscope_minor to wake up to fucking reality and realize that Jessica Price isn't going to fuck him.
uMatrix (an updated version of HTTP Switchboard) for Chrome/Chromium based browsers. It's Open Source and ten times better than NoScript.
https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/matrix/ogfcmafjalglgifnmanfmnieipoejdcf
https://github.com/gorhill/uMatrix
The same author also created uBlock which is the best ad blocker available.
https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/%C2%B5block/cjpalhdlnbpafiamejdnhcphjbkeiagm
dont worry about yahoo , they have fuckload of money. be happy , an open source project like firefox really need this money.
Yahoo doesn't have a search engine. They resell Bing. Yahoo got out of search five years ago. So this is puzzling. One could see Bing paying to be the default in Firefox, but what's the gain in running it through Yahoo?
I am another happy user with Firefox on Android. I haven't noticed important issues and I like more the browsing controls on Firefox (open new tabs, going back and forward, closing tabs) than other navigators.
Mod me down to hell if you want, but I remember when Yahoo was the big search engine. I remember seeing a friend's PC doing the smooth transitions because he had win 95's fun pack or something, and he was using Yahoo (and I kept telling him to use hotbot)
(I was still using OS/2 at the time with with win 3.11 wfw)
I've got better things to do tonight than die.
In this case the real search engine on Yahoo is Bing. It will surely be 5 more years and Bing would be interested in keeping this deal going. And don't forget that Yahoo has been in talks to be bought by Microsoft before.
Lots count of their security problems, and they took days to fix HeartBleed. Yes, this move makes perfect sense. I am not entirely sure it makes a sound business decision, or it is the last coffin in the nail for me in what respects firefox. Dickheads.
The other thing I hate about the mobile version of Firefox is that it puts the page title in the location bar, so I can't really tell what site I'm on...
Same here.
Believe it or not, there's actually a preference for this. It's under "Settings... Display ... Title Bar".
Il n'y a pas de Planet B.
Having to edit my userChrome.css file to put the tabs back where I had them because some genius at Mozilla decided it'd be funky to break the tab paradigm itself by moving the tab bar way the fuck to the top of the window while giving me neither any choice in the matter nor any way to put it back without hacking the UI is not a "pea under the mattress". It's fucked up, is what it is. KGFY.
Il n'y a pas de Planet B.
That's rich. Pretty fucking difficult not to react "negatively" to removing features with every new release of late. (Which seems to be all the UX clowns are good for.)
We're not complaining about change. We're complaining about (a) constantly taking things away, and (b) constantly breaking extensions. Extensibility supposedly being a key selling point for Firefox in the first fucking place.
I use Firefox for work. Big UI changes mess with my workflow. You're saying that FF was never meant to be used for work, maybe?
Il n'y a pas de Planet B.
I was so with you until you mentioned better memory management.
Despite what Firefox folks say about improved memory handling, it is still a huge hog.
Even then, it is my browser of choice for the other reasons you mentioned.
Or something like that. Yahoo get's more search, Firefox users get their privacy respected.
Thank you, Bradley Manning, Edward Snowden and so many others, for courageously defending humanity, my freedom and more!
Firefox has long displayed an absolutely horrible focus in their development. What used to be the cool, slim and fast new browser on the intarwebs has become a ridiculous moloch and instead of working on that, they started berating users with things like completely breaking https access for self-signed certificates which are all too common amongst developers who are traditionally also the lion share of Firefox's users. And instead of fixing that or supporting modern web formats they went on to useless "image" and coolness campaigns and redesigned the interface I dont know how many times, as if that really mattered THAT much... and finally ended up with a cheap Chrome knock-off lock that is just disgusting.
"Only one thing is impossible for God: To find any sense in any copyright law on the planet." - Mark Twain
I have repeatedly tried to use DDG over the years and I honestly wish I could like them but as someone in Europe who at times needs more "local" results, I just really, really hate DDG. A simple search on google yields the results I was looking for down to "Shopping" which can be handy or "Maps" or "Images" results. On DDG I got results that were not even close to what I was actually looking for, no shopping and no images. I have had the same experience when searching for error messages for work or code snippets. DDG results were so atrociously off and useless, it was painful.
"Only one thing is impossible for God: To find any sense in any copyright law on the planet." - Mark Twain
Older Android has a different WebKit-based browser. I installed Firefox when they tried to push Chrome: I was quite surprised, as I'd been unimpressed with earlier versions. It has a nicer UI and better privacy settings than Chrome on my phone. I'm very happy with the self-destructing cookies plugin.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
Yes, I use it (I don't use Firefox on the desktop, and haven't since around 2002). It has fine-grained cookie control, which seems to be something other Android browsers try to avoid, and with the self-destructing cookies plugin is the first browser to actually do what I want with cookies (delete them aggressively unless I explicitly ask for them to be kept). The UI is clean and it runs very smoothly on my Moto G (Cortex A7, cheap phone aimed at cheapskates and developing countries)
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
Chrome, Safari, IE11/10/8 even IE6 displays my website properly.
My guess is you've misinterpreted the standard and it's just luck it works on the others. No surprise that it will work on all webkit browsers if it works on any at all. Either that or you've found a bug. Did you file a report?
SJW n. One who posts facts.
I think AC is saying Mozilla is making Firefox work for the majority of its users which may not include you.
I currently know zero tech people still using Firefox.
No longer true. I'm Zontar--how do you do?
Il n'y a pas de Planet B.
the real reason they'll die is because they can't get a foothold in the mobile market - Google doesn't allow Android devices to be bundled with another browser by default
Which is why Mozilla are trying to make Firefox OS.
Do they have much chance? Probably not, it's a long shot. But I say, worth a shot.
But Firefox was *born out of*, and partly a response to, a monopoly situation where one provider's browser had 95% market share. So I don't think Firefox is going to be killed by another monopoly provider reaching 95% market share - just go back to the sidelines, until Google's increasingly monopolistic practices piss off enough people that momentum develops behind promoting alternatives again.
My other UID is three digits.
I'll take that bet.
Perhaps when none of the major browsers use it as the default search engine, people will start to get the idea out of their stupid heads that forcing a search engine to remove results is not the same thing as taking something off the internet. In short, Google != "The Internet".
Then perhaps we won't see more idiotic decisions like this one.
Now, what if they stop removing features not existing in Chrome just for the sake of not competing? I mean You, removers of crypto.signText...
ScriptSafe seems to work okay. Then again, I was never much of a NoScript power user, so I can't say it'd work for you.
Log in or piss off.
You mean RomneyCare right? He originated it nearly verbatim as it stands now. We'd have that in some form no matter who won that election. It benefits insurance companies too much.
Just for a fresh install, or does it change the default when you upgrade to a new version (every week or so)
and does this affect SeaMonkey?
But Yahoo just changed their logo recently. I thought that fixed all their problems.
Proverbs 21:19
It worked fine all the way back to FireFox 3.
No, I did not file a bug report. Why? Because the market's moving towards Chrome at an incredible pace. Firefox barely has 25% market share in the browser area. They fucked off with their FireFox OS and other crap, and lost core focus.
Still waiting on Serviscope_minor to wake up to fucking reality and realize that Jessica Price isn't going to fuck him.
Yahoo had their own search engine when they launched in the mid-90s. Back then, Yahoo generally gave too few results and altavista gave too many.
Dear Slashdot: next time you want to mess with the site, add a rich-text editor for comments.
I will not tolerate your intolerance!
Why is it so hard to only have politicians for a few years, then have them go away?
We never did understand how people thought this would work. Gruber may be an asshat. But for the most part he is correct. A large part of the electorate is stupid. It is how a congressman can have an approval rating in the teens and get re elected. They will not get smarter until the money runs out for their free stuff. Then they will get angry, hungry and violent.
Of course some of us have food storage, emergency supplies and guns.
Why is it so hard to only have politicians for a few years, then have them go away?
Since basically their entire reason for existence is "we're like Google but not evil," yeah.
Or I suppose you could use some other search engine but that's just a rounding error.
Unity? Screw that: XFCE. Slashdot Beta? Screw that: SoylentNews. Australis? Screw that: Pale Moon. UX developers DIAF
Irreverent or irrelevant? Methinks the latter.
In a few more releases, it won't matter anymore because Firefox will *be* Chrome anyway.
Unity? Screw that: XFCE. Slashdot Beta? Screw that: SoylentNews. Australis? Screw that: Pale Moon. UX developers DIAF
Firefox is actually getting good enough that I no longer care which browser I'm using
I think "us sycophants'" argument is that it has been this way for quite awhile now, and we're in fact passing the peak of the parabola.
Unity? Screw that: XFCE. Slashdot Beta? Screw that: SoylentNews. Australis? Screw that: Pale Moon. UX developers DIAF
They ran on sparc too.
really, a web browser is a run time for running processor and OS independent code.
Chromebooks are laptops, so laptops are being replaced by laptops?
Sure, they're more crippled.
Anyway, Firefox OS is about the same thing as Chrome OS, without requirement for a google account.
Oh, and crap. Who cares if there's 100 million or 200 million or 300 million Firefox user, we will still use it. It's dying because it's not 500 million. Right.
I don't use Chrome because I would have to change my motherboard to upgrade to 16GB of RAM.
Didn't Firefox made their URL bar "dynamic" and shit before Google Chrome existed?, and had search in the URL bar before it itself existed (in the browser called Mozilla). That is enough. It's easy to go to google's site if you want google to guess what you are trying to type.
Good on Mozilla for getting an influx of cash, but I'll be changing the search preferences of every Firefox I install on my and my coworkers systems. Yahoo's little "no more working from home" mess was cited by our CEO as a reason to halt the practice where I work. So Yahoo can go fsck itself with a broken broomstick.
Firefox barely has 25% market share in the browser area.
It's an unusual luxury that you can ignore 25% of your customers.
SJW n. One who posts facts.
It gets worse. It was found out a couple years ago that Dolphin was sending everything you did on it to a specific address in plain text.
I couldn't find much about it, but here is one page that talks about it:
http://www.onlineandroidtips.c...
Which choice makes less money for either Microsoft or Google?
There are a few things you seem to be forgetting.
Lots of people without insurance get their health care in the most expensive way, the emergency room. If this can be reserved for actual emergencies, overall health care costs go down. Also, the ACA puts health insurance into a more competitive framework, lowering costs by lowering insurance company profits.
Lots of the "healthy" you mention were using the emergency room as insurance: if they had a serious medical problem, they could only deal with it through the emergency room, at which point they'd likely go bankrupt. Internalizing that cost has got to help the system.
And, of course, the US has by far the most expensive health care system in the world per capita, and mediocre public health stats. Anything on the way to a decent health care system is going to help long-term.
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes
Back then, Yahoo search results relied on websites being registered. It wasn't a search engine as we know it today (spidering the Web to see what's out there) but more like a phone book.
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes
Yahoo *is* Bing, actually, as far as the search engine backend goes.
And Bing really is a search engine backend
[rimshot]
I see what you did there.....
They never had a search engine, they had a hierarchical link index.
It was almost like using a massive, nested bookmarks folder, and it relied on user-submitted pages to grow (no spidering).
rage, rage against the dying of the light
Just FYI, the "tab paradigm" for browsers was largely invented by Opera (as an extension of their historical strong support for MDI) - and guess where they had put the tab bar relative to the address?..
Tabs above page-related UI (address bar, reload button etc) makes perfect sense, because those controls pertain only to the current selected page.
False.
Well, 50% false.
It depends on which addon class you're talking about. Extensions are as you say interpreted JavaScript. Plug-ins, however, are compiled code and absolutely do not work the same under Linux as Windows.
Both of those fit under the umbrella term addons.
"Nine times out of ten, starting a fire is not the best way to solve the problem." - my wife
Controlled flight into terrain.
300+ posts here and no one has yet mentioned that Thunderbird has been using Microsoft(R) Bing(R) as its default search engine for some time now.
"Nine times out of ten, starting a fire is not the best way to solve the problem." - my wife
I use Firefox in preference to Chrome because of the superior and more permissive add on ecosystem, fine grained JavaScript controls, better tools for privacy protection and better (yes, really) memory management for my browsing habits.
Just the fact that I can have hassle free ad blocking on Android makes it worthy of consideration.
Great you mean how Firefox got rid of the option to turn off javascript.
It is turning more and more into a crappy version of chrome as they remove features but refuse to redo internal architecture like SMP support with per process tabs. IE 7 (yes that horrible browser from last decade) has better security with a sandbox and process per tabs. WTF??
Electrolysis or whatever it is called is 5 years too late. I hate no smooth scrolling anymore in chrome or the shitty font rendering but IE and Chrome are lightyears ahead.
Memory management is false as soon as you open lots of tabs both IE and Chrome can handle them and still stay responsive via processes for each tab. Not true in Firefox and FF uses the most ram. FF 4.0 vs IE 9 proved it.
Firefox needs a fork bad as I do not want webkit turning into the next IE 6 in the coming years with Google setting webstandards if the trend continues but shoot Firefox really fell from grace as a lightweight browser alternative to Mozilla and turning into Mozilla.
http://saveie6.com/
IE ... as in modern IE is frankly a better corporate browser.
It supports GPO, webstandards, corporate apps, domain integration, and doesn't change every freaking 6 weeks??!
True it lacks add-ons I will admit but for work they do not care. Ie no longer is a pos it was last decade where you needed hacks to get anything to work which of course meant it only worked in one version of one browser from years ago.
Firefox is in a world of trouble. It is like having an IQ test with the retarded special ed kid when IE 6 was king in its early years. Now you have the athlete of IE who is fast with the gifted kid who is Chrome. Where has firefox went?
http://saveie6.com/
"Actually. Most conservatives understood intuitively that you could not add tons of poor to insurance roles and cover all pre existing conditions without raising prices heavily on the healthy."
I think you are forgetting a few things. ACA increases the insured pool by mandating that everybody get insurance. That certainly helps offset the increased cost of insuring people with pre-existing conditions.
On a side note, I was denied insurance before, because on the application form I could not tell them when I had last seen a doctor. I haven't in probably 15 years or more. They came back with a quick rejection. With ACA I was able to get insurance. Now they get easy few hundred dollars from me every month. I still have not seen a doctor. Don't need to.
Maybe 2% of our 'customers' use FireFox. 89% Chrome, 4% Safari, 5% IE of some flavor.
Still waiting on Serviscope_minor to wake up to fucking reality and realize that Jessica Price isn't going to fuck him.
Great, another step when setting up a new install of Firefox. If only Chrome would bring back side tabs...
Cool
Why is it so hard to only have politicians for a few years, then have them go away?
I switched to Opera back then (and actually paid for it). I then went to Safari when I got a Mac because all of the other Mac web browsers had crappy integration with the rest of the UI. This has improved a bit, and I'm quite tempted to start using Firefox again on the desktop. I like the UI in new versions, but I don't like the lack of security. Once they start sandboxing tabs properly, I'd be very tempted to switch. Lack of keychain integration was an annoyance, but apparently there's an extension for that.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
I've not noticed any slowness and the Cortex A7 is not exactly a nippy CPU. Sure, it's quad-core, but in terms of performance (and power consumption and die area), those four cores all add up to about the same as a single Cortex A15.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
NotScripts is the NoScripts equivalent in Chrome and it works pretty well.
NotScripts works well for what it does, but all it does is toggle scripts on/off. NoScript does a LOT more, providing an XSS jail, among other things.
Excellent! I might check this out -- it appears to indeed be NoScript and then some. Then the only roadblock for me is to see how I can prevent usage stats from flowing back to Google. There must be a custom build of Chromium for that....
[T]he more the Big Data analytics companies know about you the more they will be able to manipulate you and control your life all for their benefit, not yours.
I disagree -- they don't want to control your life all for their benefit -- they want to sell the analytics to third parties who want to control your life, and they want to sell "access" to third parties to influence your perception of the online world.
This is actually part of the EU argument for the "right to be forgotten" -- and the only part I agree with; the big data analytics companies like Google are already serving up different results based on the user index -- if they're already doing this, then it's only one more step to say "these people are in the EU, and so shouldn't see these results at all (not just rank them lower like they already do).
This all started with Amazon back in the day, when they started showing different deals and adjusting ALL pricing based on your CI profile. Google eventually got in on that, and it now affects pretty much all of their products (even GMail will bubble up different emails based on what they think you'll want to pay most attention to). This could be considered beneficial, but it's naieve to think that you're the only one getting this benefit; it's being sold in reverse-aggregate form to others so that those who pay Google get finely honed access to the customers they think might want the services. Nothing wrong with that either, but I'd rather not take part unless I choose to (as opposed to being shown the altered world view as my default browsing experience).
As a result, I use Google Search now when I want something targeting me, and ddg/yahoo when I want to search for something specific, as Google's got really good at pushing what it thinks I'd prefer rather than what I want. It gets this data through GMail, Chrome, GoogDNS, GooglePlus, etc. I usually use Youtube as an indicator of how well they're tracking my current browser, and when things start to skew too much, I blow away all my cookies, flash bugs, etc. and renew my DHCP lease. Usually takes a couple of months.
I'm sad at this. If they wanted to swtich, I'd have prefered Bing at the least. In term of quality search, as far as I'm concerned it goes Google->Bing->Yahoo->DuckDuckGo As an example, I was doing a search to see what are my options to check Boardgamegeek on a mobile without using the main website as it's not mobile friendly at all. So I did this search on all 4 engines: "boardgamegeek on mobile" Google and Bing showed as first result the bgg wiki page on mobile access which has all the relevant information. Yahoo, even though it's using Bing tech, never showed that search result anywhere in the first page, neither did DuckDuckGo, and their search results didn't gave me any answer I was looking for. So, useless in the case of this search. So, pretty sad that they chose Yahoo :(