Firefox drops Google as global default search provider, switches to Yahoo

Firefox drops Google as global default search provider, switches to Yahoo

 

For almost the entirety of Firefox’s 12-year history, Mozilla — and thus Firefox — has been primarily funded by a lucrative deal with Google. Since 2004, Google has been paying Mozilla around $100 million per year — or about 85% of Mozilla’s total income — to keep Google as the default search provider. Today, that finally changes: Google is out and Yahoo is in. Kind of.
The terms of Mozilla’s new deal are fairly complex. Yahoo will become Firefox’s default search provider in the US. Under the hood, Yahoo Search is still powered by Microsoft Bing. As part of the deal, Yahoo will once again abide by Firefox’s Do Not Track feature, for users who would rather Yahoo did not track their search activity. There will also be a “new enhanced Yahoo Search experience that features a clean, modern interface” specifically for Firefox users.

 

In China, Baidu will remain the default search provider — but in Russia, where Google was previously the default, it will be replaced by the local Yandex Search. In all cases, the drop-down menu will continue to offer a variety of search engines (Google, Amazon, DuckDuckGo, Wikipedia, etc.)


Somewhat oddly, Mozilla’s official blog post doesn’t mention any other territories — you know, like those couple of billion people in Europe, Africa, and South America. Mozilla PR confirmed with ExtremeTech that Google will remain the default search provider in Europe — but declined to tell us why. I would guess that Google remains the default search provider everywhere other than the US, China, or Russia — but I guess we’ll find out for certain when the next version of Firefox is released.

Yahoo is now the default search provider for Firefox in the US. It’s funny how Yahoo/Bing looks almost identical to Google, eh?

Why the coyness? Well, it depends how much you want to infer from the Mozilla blog post, and from the rather limited remarks by Mozilla CEO Chris Beard in an interview with Marketing Land. In short, it sounds like both Google and Yahoo were offering Mozilla a similar amount of money for the US — but Yahoo was more “aligned with our values of choice and independence.” This phrase is clearly euphemistic for a disagreement/misalignment between Google and Mozilla, but we can only guess at the specifics. But then why is Google still Firefox’s default search provider in Europe? When Marketing Land asked Beard directly, “he gave no explanation.”



Clearly, this new deal isn’t all about values of choice and independence. Either Yahoo didn’t want to be the default search provider in Europe (which makes sense, given how most of its market share is in the US), Google made an offer for Europe (and Africa and South America?) that Mozilla couldn’t refuse, or perhaps it was a mix of the two. It might be as simple as Yahoo/Bing simply not offering a very good search experience outside the US, too (Bing is excellent in the US, okay-to-good in most other English-speaking countries, and bad elsewhere).
Anyway, if we gloss over the odd lack of transparency, the main thing is that Mozilla now seems to be much more in control of its own destiny. The exact terms of its previous agreements with Google are unknown, but they were obviously more restrictive than Mozilla would’ve liked. When the majority of your income derives from a single source, it’s rarely a healthy setup for both parties. Now, Mozilla seems to have more control over who it partners with in specific territories — which should result in a better experience for both Mozilla and the hundreds of millions of Firefox users around the world.